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NVidia & ATI vs Futuremark
by Steve Gibson, May 23, 2003 3:42pm PDTA while back many of you may recall ATI getting caught red-handed having their drivers detect Quake3 firing up and they would drop the image quality slightly to improve benchmark scores. That was just a tiny bit of a scandal. Well now Futuremark is accusing NVidia of playing naughty when it comes to their benchmark suite:
"Recently, there have been questions and some confusion regarding 3DMark 03 results obtained with certain Nvidia" products, Futuremark said in the statement. "We have now established that Nvidia's Detonator FX drivers contain certain detection mechanisms that cause an artificially high score when using 3DMark 03."The real question being, is NVidia dropping image quality to inflate those scores? If NVidia is simply adjusting how their driver reacts to the application to improve performance without hindering the quality, then I dont see the problem. Just about all hardware vendors do this to make sure their stuff works with the most popular game engines. Also keep in mind that NVidia (among others) has been vocal in the past about the latest 3DMark not being a very good benchmark, that could play a part in Futuremark not exactly being thrilled with NVidia and perhaps trying throw some bad mojo their way. update: It seems that ATI is also being looked at and I'm just blind (Thanks Rick):
Our investigations reveal that some drivers from ATI also produce a slightly lower total score on this new build of 3DMark03. The drop in performance on the same test system with a Radeon 9800 Pro using the Catalyst 3.4 drivers is 1.9%. This performance drop is almost entirely due to 8.2% difference in the game test 4 result, which means that the test was also detected and somehow altered by the ATI drivers. We are currently investigating this further.update: Here is some stuff NVidia is accused of doing.
Comments
Ok, So nVidia is being accused of cheating by a site that was turned away by nVidia at E3 in a benchmark that was put down by nVidia because this benchmark that nVidia never had access to the code for isn't working at 100% during certain points of the benchmarking process and causing slightly exaggerated scores.
Listen, I don't give a damn what company makes what (as long as it does what the heck I want it too) but I am going to have to say that both this site and FutureMark have grudges against nVidia and anything they have to say should be taken with a huge grain of salt here.
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Nvidia very much IS lowering IQ in some instances for improved numbers.
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Manufacturers can write whatever code they want to run their hardware. Futuremark has no jurisdiction over their driver optimizations.
It seems all future updates have to run through 3DMark's permission? Can't they leave well enough alone and stop trying to puff their chest out? It's just a synthetic BENCHMARK. Sheesh.
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Well thank for letting us know that your nvidia fanboys looks like moving over to gamershell for my reviewsand info.....
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http://www.warp2search.net/article.php?sid=12398&mode=thread&order=0
In another they introduce their own clipping planes that ONLY works with the default path... Geez... This is not the same as optimizing for an application!
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http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6042
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http://www.beyond3d.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=6028
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"Since NVIDIA is not part in the FutureMark beta program (a program which costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in) we do not get a chance to work with Futuremark on writing the shaders like we would with a real applications developer. We don't know what they did but it looks like they have intentionally tried to create a scenario that makes our products look bad. This is obvious since our relative performance on games like Unreal Tournament 2003 and Doom3 shows that The GeForce FX 5900 is by far the fastest graphics on the market today."
Source: NVnews.net
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And I certainly cannot believe that some people are looking at this and saying "See, told you. Synthetic benchmarks are bad!"
Please. Anytime a company releases information that inflates their standing in the market place and can affect sales of their product under false pretenses they are cheating. That is ethically wrong on any level.
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maybe I'm just naive here, but if both companies are cheating, doesn't that approximately equal out (sorta like two wrongs making a right)?
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Then ATI wins. NVidia wins. Consumers /REALLY/ win. Everyone but FutureMark and their pansyassed benchmarking program which hardly simulates real game conditions wins.
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And can these same hardware "experts" stop using quake3 as a bench? Its completely worthless.
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Would there be any walls rendered by either team?
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a) They are altering their drivers for it, which means nvidia cares about what futuremark does.
b) Futuremark isn't going out of business any time soon.
c) People are going to continue to use futuremark to tweak their systems because it's a great tool for comparing computers. (Rephrase: Scores between other comps are not important. eg. Switching from 2x agp to 4x agp and witnessing the difference in 3dmark scores is useful. It will remain a great tool to see how each tweak you make on your own comp affects your own futuremark score.)
However, there is a tinge of black mail that can be called into question. eg:
- futuremark says Nvidia cheats
- nvidia says they don't
- futuremark forces Nvidia to participate in the beta program by announcing off colour news blips
I don't like that futuremark says these things, but nvidia put themselves in this position by Llema a) from above.
Conclusion:
Nvidia marketting (The nvidia tech/h/w doods are excellent) doods are retards. They've boxed themselves in the corner by saying: We don't like/use futuremark, yet we have tweaked our drivers purposely for futuremark. The sooner nvidia gets back to beta'ing with futuremark, the sooner this PR fiasco will be over.
b.
Year after year they come out with an unrealistic product for benchmarking. year after year the two main graphics card companies tell them this... So this year, they come out with a ridiculously stressful benchmark, and now they are crying because ati and nvidia are playing the same pathetic little game that they are... Trying to make themselves look good by tinkering with thier drivers to work a certain way with 3dmark.
Futuremark should realize this. Two can play dirty.
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