Futuremark Whines, Apologizes

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A little happy fun lawsuit threatening for your lunch time. As many people know 3DMark comes under quite a bit of scrutiny given the popularity of the benchmark with the 03 release being dismissed by more than a few websites. HardOCP was was one of the vocal websites with their opinions and Futuremark thought threatening a lawsuit would be fun after seeing criticism of the 05 release. The first email:

I strongly advise you to not to slander our product, 3DMark, on your web site. Take down all your false and unjustified and baseless claims about 3DMark. 

HardOCP responded with a "wha?" and here was the response from Futuremark:

You know what I mean. Your articles have consistently discredited 3DMark for years now and the few justifications there have sometimes been have been without merit. It seems to us as if you have something against our product personally and are using your popular website as a platform to attack and trying to discredit on purpose and with baseless claims and sometimes also with erroneous information.

I will no longer communicate with you after this. Our attorney is looking that this situation will get resolved and will contact you if necessary.

Tero Sarkkinen
Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing
Futuremark Corporation

Tero however appears to have shortly later realized how incredibly silly these threats were and posted a public apology. Go ahead, lets all chuckle together!

Steve Gibson is the cofounder of Shacknews.com. Originally known as sCary's Quakeholio back in 1996, Steve is now President of Gearbox Publishing after selling Shacknews to GameFly in 2009.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    October 7, 2004 10:56 AM

    3d mark DOES suck. It dosn't benchmark proformance, it really benchmarks drivers and how well written they are to proform in 3d mark. Coupled with 3d marks business dealings with the very companies it's supposed to be testing make it a pretty dubious testing software.

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      October 7, 2004 11:06 AM

      This is why I only trust in game benches to gauge my performance. Sure, the driver may be optimized for that game, but its something I play -- NOT watch.

      3DMark is something to generate #s -- its not something you play with your friends.

      • reply
        October 7, 2004 11:06 AM

        Unless *play* between your friends are stroking each one of your epenis'

    • reply
      October 7, 2004 11:23 AM

      I really do NOT understand this argument, of course 3dmark isn't going to exactly tell you how well your video card will run Half-Life 2. But before actual benchmarks were released for Half-Life 2, what were you going to use to get a good sense of which card is the fastest for dx9 games?

      • reply
        October 7, 2004 11:39 AM

        far cry, doom 3, other dx 9 games? the major point is, 3dmark doesn't perform comparably at ALL to current games. I do not get 3 fps in current games, and do not see myself getting that sort of speed for 3-5 years even on my current previous generation card. developers don't develop to wreck the consumers framerate, 3dmark does push it that way

        • reply
          October 7, 2004 11:46 AM

          Yes but you know you'll get a better performance in HL2 if you upgrade and end up running 3dmark with 10fps. That's the sort of thing 3dmark can tell you.

          • reply
            October 7, 2004 11:56 AM

            Yet not really. If nvidia does some hacks and tweaks and it jumps the 3dmarks, you aren't playing so its going to be pretty hard for you to notice visual changes or hacks like we saw back in the quack3 days.

            Also, as we saw from Doom3/HL2, performance in one does not performance in all make. If you buy a card because it can give you more 3d marks, you are fucking crazy.

            • reply
              October 7, 2004 1:57 PM

              nvidia will make hacks to half-life2, so whats your point? Its a benchmark utility, its not a freaking game.

              • reply
                October 7, 2004 2:02 PM

                Did you read my post and understand the quack 3 reference?

                If nvidia optimizes their driver for hl2 and it doesn't take an image quality hit, great. Good stuff. However, if they uglify the game to make it look better in benchmarks, the community will catch them.

                When this happens in a benchmark TOOL and emphasis on TOOL, it is a lot harder to notice these subtle changes. So, I am going to have a hard time drawing any kind of conclusions from a 3dmark score or 3dmark FPS mark.

        • reply
          October 7, 2004 1:58 PM

          and before any dx9 were released?

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