ATI Cheating Benchmarks

omg does ati suck ass or what?

time for ATI to spread those butt cheeks

I haven't read all the comments under this thread, but I've read a few uninformed ones near the top. I read all about this yesterday.

When you run quake3.exe, the ATI drivers FORCE the game settings lower. That means it uses 16 bit color and a lower texture setting, just as if you tweaked it yourself. This means that it's impossible to actually have the game set to the highest settings because the drivers FORCE the settings lower. This isn't just "image quality" sacrifice, but "graphic settings" haxoring.

So the bottom line is that with these drivers, when you see benchmarks claiming
"Geforce3 vs ATI card, high detail"

it really means

"GeForce3 high detail vs ATI medium detail"

When's the last time you bought a card because it ran crappy settings as fast as other cards run pretty settings?

* F R A U D 'D *

Yikes, that was horrible. I was hoping for some competition for nVidia, but they kinda flushed their whole crudentials down the sh*tter. poopy.

fucked-up well this bullshit is where the fuck that bastard gets interesting. Are you listening? Saw this bullshit on some foreign pages the fucking other day that I couldnt understand but RageUnderground (Burn in HELL HardOCP) has the fucking scoop on fuckin' what ATI was up to fuckin' with their Quake3 specific drivers. Seems fucked-up to fuckin' my stupid ass to make your sorry cards work faster on apps that you know are popular, until you see this bullshit:

- yes, we did do optimizations specificly for Quake 3.
- yes, we did that piece of shit because you are one shit-ass piece of shit and that piece of shit is being used as a benchmark in reviews of our cards.
- yes, we sacrificed imagequality to fuckin' gain better framerates.

That is just plain underhanded. That shit's one shit to make sure your sorry drivers work well with particular apps, but its a fuckin' whole different shit to fuckin' actually make the fucking game uglier in the fucking name of benchmark numbers. I should wallop your neck. Especially when the only fucking way for people to fuckin' disable this bullshit option is hacking drivers or renaming their EXE files. Score one for ATI!

ATI == AMD

ATI: Performance is measured in FPS. Our FPS suck because we have high image quality. We'll lower that quality to get numbers equal to NVidia's offerings.

AMD: Performance is measured in MHz. Our MHz suck because our CPUs do more per MHz. We are telling people we have an 1800+ model so they think that's like 1800 MHz in the P4 world.

And me, I support it. NVidia has better drivers yes, but they have certainly messed with benchmarks as well.

Lame: ATI should've made that public before anybody could discover it.

booyaka

Ati spokesperson:

- yes, we did do optimizations specificly for Quake 3.
- yes, we did it because it is being used as a benchmark in reviews of our cards.
- yes, we sacrificed image quality to gain better framerates

They forgot

- yes, we realize that our 8500 is *NOT* a GF3 killer............

Anyone remember back in the Voodoo days, PowerVR pulled the same crap, having their drivers "optimized" for a certain benchmark .exe

"- yes, we did it because it is being used as a benchmark in reviews of our cards."

so... being as they know that benchmarks sell their product, they altered the benchmarks.

false advertising? you bet.

someone stfu and call the better business bureau already.

Oh right, as if video card reviews even talk about image quality. And now this is suddenly a big deal? ATI has been consistently better image quality than Nvidia in many apps, but did the reviews take it into account? No, video card reviews only take into account FRAMES PER SECOND. This is like saying, OH NO ANTI-ALIASING is not enabled! This is not maximum image quality! In the name of FRAME-RATE! Jesus H. Christ, give me a fucking break. This has been blown WAY WAY WAY out of proportion. Anyone with an intelligent mind will not base their purchasing decision on something as trivial as this. ATI has many things in their favor, including best DVD support, the best 2D quality for the desktop, very fast Direct3D (which most non-first person shooter games are), dual-monitor, and more 3D features. And all of a sudden everyone is capitalizing on something as stupid as a barely noticable lower visual quality for quake3.exe as opposed to quack3.exe?

Oh right, so if they had made it internally detect Quake3 and then change the mode to lower quality, would it have made a difference? Then no one would have cared would they? They would just evaluate it as having higher quality in some games, and lower quality in others. Then QUACK3.exe would also be slightly lower quality. BUT OH NO, this time it's crappy because if you rename it, you get better quality. Haha come on, think about how stupid this is. This is a purely trivial matter than Steve and other websites have blown completely out of proportion. It's like taking a good video card that is already looked-down-upon simply because it is by a company known as ATI rather than Nvidia, and not giving it a chance by taking one trivial thing and giving people a negative impression about it. So sad. That is just my opinion on the subject and the way I see the situation. :\

--Valiance--

The people who don't think ATI is being underhanded don't understand what they've done.

Image quality differences between Geforce and Radeon, if they exist at all, are slight, to say the least.

ATI has done two things to make their card run faster:
-1. They've changed certain 32 bit textures to 16 bits
-2. They've blurred Q3 textures to a degree equivalent to [i]r_picmip 1[/i] in the Q3 engine

Essentially, this is Q3's normal quality setting, al beit at a higher resolution.

As a result, if you run benchmarks with the unmodified q3 executable, you get these results:
ATI: q3 1024*768 [i]normal qualit/i]
Nvida: q3 1024*768 [i]high qualit/i]
[i]Even though when the ATI machine reports that it's in high qualit/i]

This is sure underhanded, if not blatant fraud

200th post!

--Valiance--
big deal! who cares!

Oh well, I guess we all just see the situation differently. I see this as a company move to decide to focus on frame-rate vs. visual quality in one game since most of the consumers seemed from their perspective at the time to be more concerned about fast frame-rates than visual quality, and made the compromize. But I certainly can see where some of you are coming from with your comments.

Oh and #114, ATI Radeon 7500 and 8500 have SUPERIOR Direct3D performance while Nvidia cards have SUPERIOR OpenGL performance. The reason why 3dmark is one of the only benches to see ATI do better is because there are very few D3D-native games that have a good benchmarking mode. What we have is Serious Sam and Q3A and Return to Castle Wolfenstein, all of which are OpenGL games. Unreal Tournament doesn't really count because it was never D3D-native. And the other reality is, for non first person shooter genre games, by far the vast majority of games Direct3D/DX8 as opposed to OpenGL. So don't be sceptical on that aspect.

--Valiance--

WTF????? As if any of us havent use optimized drivers.... Give me a break. This is most likly a marketing plan by nvidia to get rid of what ever rival they think they have left. Why lets as them(Nvidia) the same question??? Please as gentlepersons lets give it a rest..

ATI should just change their name to 3dfx... cuz they'll be hanging with them soon enough. What a bunch of losers. I was thinking of buying an 8500, now that I know it will make Q3A uglier, ATI can go F themselves.

guess i wont be buying an ATI card for sure now! and if they go out of business that will suck because nvidia will rape me but i wont feel sorry for ATI!

Oh gezus Semi talk about going overboard, its fairly well known that Nvidia got a lot of its magical 'Detonator' speed increases from tinkering with the image quality in 3d games. Now ATi does it and they're evil?
What ATi did isn't 100% above board, but Nvidia surely isn't guiltless either.
All the false indignation over this whole thing is ridiculous.

i got one question for all you people suddenly jumping on the 'fuck ati' bandwaggon

where were all you assholes when creative labs was stabbing aureal in the back and driving them under....

I don't really care, I wasn't going to buy one anyway.

Ati is doing a good job, if they could just get their drivers right, everyone would be better off.
So chill Ati haters or you'll be paying more for that future nvidia card you been dreaming about.
Ati your driver dept. needs help - NOW - GET IT

we did it because it is being used as a benchmark in reviews of our cards.

In other words, to inflate the reviews of their cards to better-than-average.

Wow. ATi almost looked like they had their shit together after sucking from 97-99.

SUPRISE!

I gotta go AFK for a few hours. Buh bye. Oh and uhh, shacknews.com seems to be VERY SLOW right now (takes forever to load anything), though I'm not sure if it's my internet connection or the shacknews server.

--Valiance--

I honestly see nothing really wrong with a video card having better quality in some games and worse quality in others. The only difference is this is a low-tech method of detecting a game (the name of the exe)... but really video card companies make compromizes between visual quality and frame-rate, and this is no different! If they had made this internally detect the game, then we would accept it as simply having lower quality in some games. Then again, since most video card reviews only focus on frame-rate, we probably would never have even noticed.

--Valiance--

Nice one ATI. You try to be devious little devils, and nVidia *still* has you by the balls.

* 3 D F X ' D *

Thanks for letting us know that ATI is gay. This comfirms it!

blow me ati

Here is challenge for you all.

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/radeonquack/images/01.png

http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/radeonquack/images/03.png

One of these running on Radeon 8500 cough high quality cough setting with everything on.
One is running on GeForce3 HQ

Make a guess :)

So if the reviewers didn't notice ths image quality sacrifice whats the big fucking deal?

When I buy a card I check for benchmarks other than Q3 to get a clear idea of what I am buying. This is hardly anything to soil ones pants about.

Hey steve, this was on HardOCP and /. yesterday, I mailed it to you..

Omg look at the screen shots.. there is a whole load of difference.. ati drivers make quake3 lose all the sharpness. This is plain and simple deception. BYE BYE ATI.
The Public should flog them.

The sooner ATI releases a patch that allows people to turn this "feature" off, the better off they'll be.

It seems to compress the textures at the outside of vision, without compressing the ones in the middle as much. Sounds like a good idea; the stuff at the outside is usually going to be in my peripheral vision anyway...but ONLY if the user can actually control it.

If I could turn the thing off, or -- better yet -- TELL it what qualities to make each section of the screen be, then this would be a good bit of driver code, yet another way to tweak the game's settings to my preference.

But you can't turn it off, or change it in any way...and ATI didn't even admit to using it.
I can't imagine them thinking of it as a FEATURE; if it was, they'd have a snazzy name for it. So why put it in, if not to inflate benchmarks?

But shit, it's not like corporations never do anything unethical. This is just unethical and STUPID -- but it'll take their coders an hour to patch it to do what I've suggested, if they are allowed to.

I was gonna get a Radeon8500, but this kinda pisses me off a bit...if ATI doesn't change it (at least the visual reduction bullshit!) I may get a NVidia product next time around (I prefer ATI's 2D quality, and I do watch DVDs...but I also play a LOT of games; Q3 mods in particular). ATI needs to drop this, and instead get their driver programmers to program some great drivers (to be honest, I'll probably be fine since I'm on 98...but with this visual quality reduction it kinda pisses you off a bit). Oh well, I plan on upgrading my vid card in Spring/Summer anyway, so I can definately take a wait and see attitude (my whole upgrade schedule got reversed, now I upgrade mobo/processor/RAM in Winter, and VidCards in summer).

Hell, everyone bitches around here how much Q3 sucks and that they unistalled it and never play it anyway.

I wouldn't touch ATI if it were teh only video card availible. Damn Canadianas!

Eh, yep this was poorly handled by ATi. But, it really doesn't surprise me or disgust me. ATi made a decision that they needed their hardware to run fast under Quake3, because Quake3 is the defacto "real world" benchmarking test.

Personally, I think this entire thing is being blown way out of proportion.

Oh, and as for bias, I own 4 nVidia cards, and no ATi cards.

i'll stick with my elsa gladiac 920