Here is your hardware scene soap opera of the day... So it looks like Futuremark suddenly doesnt feel like NVidia is cheating on 3DMark03 after all now? Yeah.. check out the full statement on HardOCP and here's a little summary and translation:

FutureMark Statement: Futuremark now has a deeper understanding of the situation and NVIDIA's optimization strategy. In the light of this, Futuremark now states that NVIDIA's driver design is an application specific optimization and not a cheat.
NVIDIA Statement: NVIDIA works closely with developers to optimize games for GeForceFX. These optimizations (including shader optimizations) are the result of the co-development process. This is the approach NVIDIA would have preferred also for 3DMark03.
Translation VIA HardOCP: FutureMark reneges on previous statements and confirms NVIDIA was not cheating on their benchmark and NVIDIA will not take a legal action against FutureMark that would bankrupt them.

The guys at Boomtown have conducted an interview with NVidia's Adam Foat, asking the European marketing manager about the failure that is the GeForce FX 5800, the noisy fan, 3DMark, and ATI among other things.

A 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.

Quickly following the 2.41 driver release, NVidia has now released nForce drivers 2.42 for Windows 2000 and Windows XP, removing the previous included IDE driver. This driver wasn't exactly all that great. Thanks TommysGun.

NVidia has released updated nForce drivers for mainboards powered by this chipset. There are drivers for Windows XP, Windows 2000 and Win9x. There's improved EAX support and an updated audio control panel for all three versions, and the XP/2K version have improved IDE performance as well. Thanks AMD Zone.

Nvidia has released version 44.03 of the Detonator drivers, available for WinXP/2K as well as Win9x. Another speed boost is promised, Tech Report has an article about this new release.

As mentioned before, NVidia is launching the NV35 at E3 to make us forget about the first GeForce FX products. Find out if they do with articles looking at the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra on HardOCP, AnandTech, Tech Report, Bjorn3D, NeoSeeker and Hexus. There's also a special HardOCP article using DOOM 3 as a benchmark.

The core clock rate of the GeForce FX 5900 Ultra will be 450MHz, down 50MHz from the NV30 chip in the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra. The GeForce FX 5900 Ultra 256MB should be available in June, if all goes as planned, for only $499 American money. A non-Ultra variant of the GeForce FX 5900 with 128MB should hit the market in June for $399, but core and memory clock speeds for that product have not been finalized. Tantalizingly, NVIDIA has plans to introduce a cheaper 128MB "value" card based on NV35, as well. This card should be available in July for the bargain-basement price of $299.

NVidia's official press release can be found here.

It looks like the rumors going around are true, the next-gen NVidia chipset codenamed NV35 is set to show up next week at an E3 unveiling party. This brief blurb by some important NVidia guy is the deal:

Chief Executive Jen-Hsun Huang said the company will launch its new graphics chip, code-named "NV35," next week. It will replace the company's prior top-end product, code-named NV30, which Huang said was unsuccessful.

Ah yes this is a deal I'm sure you will all be excited to see. As we all know PC gamers prefer to have their choices limited and the folks at NVidia and EA are trying to do their part to make sure that happens more often. Just have a look see:

Under the terms of the deal, Nvidia hardware will become the "preferred" graphics platform for Electronic Arts's video game studios, and video games developed by Electronic Arts may offer features designed to work on Nvidia hardware.

As to what defines "preferred" has yet to be revealed. Thanks HardOCP

PenStar Systems has posted a lengthy article about Nvidia, based on an interview with Mike Hara who is VP of Investor Relations and Communications there. Topics include the Xbox and Xbox 2, the partnership between NVidia and TMSC, mobile plans, the Personal Cinema product and the nForce 2 among several other things.

ATI and NVidia both announced their new mobile chipsets today, offering increased graphics speed for notebook users. You can find articles about the new chips at Tech Report, Anand Tech and Extreme Tech.

HardOCP, Tech Report and Bjorn 3D all have posted previews of the GeForce FX family. So far we had only heard about the GeForce FX 5800 card, but an entire line of cards is planned for release. All supporting DirectX9, there will be cards retailing for $199, $149 and all the way down to $79.

So things havent been looking so great for NVidia recently, after sitting at the top for quite a while with the GeForce line, they were passed up last year by the folks at ATI with their Radeon 9700 cards. NVidia didnt seem too worried with their NV30 card on the way but then they started running into problem after problem and the date kept slipping further and further back. They ended up doing a 'paper launch' last year in mid-November for the card in hopes of taking a bit of the attention away from ATI. Then, a bit over 2 months later they handed out review cards to the hardware sites where the card got panned for the most part. Now here we are closing in on mid-February without any GeForceFX cards on shelves still, and then this hits, the GeForceFX Ultra retail release has been canned. Doh!

the GeForceFX 5800 Ultra will never make it to retail. Those of you that PreBuy the cards will still get an Ultra model with the FX Flow cooling unit. Those who don't will have the opportunity to get the non-Ultra version (400/800) off the retail shelves for a price of US$300.00.

To compound things a bit more, word from the ATI camp is that their next cards based on the R350 chips are already on the production line in significant numbers. What's this mean? It means yay for market competition! I cant wait to see what NVidia does next later this year.

Well today is the big day where NVidia changes the world if we're ready or whatever the heck that latest slogan they had was. The GeForceFX card has been unveiled on a few of the hardware websites and in a fashion that isnt really quite NVidia, the new generation card really isnt very impressive. In fact it's marginally faster than a Radeon 9700pro at best, and ATI's next-gen card is slated to come out in less than 8 weeks following the GeForceFX shelf date. Here is the benchmark parade:

- HardOCP
- AnandTech
- TomsHardware
- ExtremeTech

One thing to keep in mind though is that as always these are early drivers, and performance gains will probably happen... Enough to trade up? Hrm... yeah you might wanna ponder that one for a bit and see what ATI's new card looks like in a month or two. AMAZING NOTE: As really insightful and clever as those 'LOL 3DFX'd!' and 'NVidia is doomed!' posts are, we're gonna mark them as stupid just to be rebelious.

Here's a bit I meant to post about NVidia a couple of days ago. It seems they are taking a much more controlling approach for the NV30 slated for release in the next few months. Very interesting...

NVidia has once again released some new Detonator drivers which are available for WinXP/2K and Win9x/ME. WHQL certification is pending and it looks like this new release mainly offers some compatability updates. Thanks HardOCP.

NVidia has released some new drivers for their nForce 1 and nForce 2 motherboard chipsets, for Win2k, WinXP and Win98SE/ME. The new release adds ASIO and OpenAL driver support and fixes some bugs.

Beyond3D has a new Q&A with NVidia's Geoff Ballew. Questions are about the GeForce FX, and topics include the 128-bit bus, texture mapping units, floating point speed, shaders, FSAA and Anisotropic filtering among other things.

The NDA has been lifted, the NVidia GeForce FX has officially been announced. You can find articles on HardOCP, AnandTech, FiringSquad, Guru of 3D, Bjorn3D, Hexus and Beyond 3D and there are various press releases on nvidia.com. Some of the features: 1Ghz DDR-2 memory, 64-bit and 128-bit floating point color, 128 bit memory bus width, and of course it supports DirectX 9. Of course what we care about is benchmark numbers, and we'll have to wait a while for that. But rumor has it it's going to be pretty damn fast.

"Computer games today are fast and exciting, yet they still lack the ability to engage us emotionally," said Jen-Hsun Huang, president and CEO at NVIDIA. "With the GeForce FX GPU, game developers now have the power to create awe-inspiring visuals and bring character emotion to life. GeForce FX enables a new type of interactive expression we call cinematic computing."
"The NVIDIA GeForce FX GPU is the result of ten years of passionate effort by the best 3D graphics engineers in the business and includes technologies invented at NVIDIA and 3dfx," Huang continued. "The GeForce FX GPU delivers unprecedented 3D graphics performance and the NVIDIA Unified Driver Architecture ensures the reliability and quality that has become the hallmark of NVIDIA GPUs." ...

Though Nvidia will officially announce their new graphics chipset tomorrow (the one known as NV30 until now), Investors.com already has a story about it where it's mentioned the new chip will be called the GeForce FX and will go on sale in February. The price? $360.

Graphics chipmaker Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) plans to unveil its latest line of chips on Monday. Nvidia says its new GeForce FX chips will bring to home video games the same level of animation in today's Hollywood movies. The company's earlier chips were part of the technology used to make "Shrek" and "Monsters Inc." "We've been trying to bring 3-D graphics to the mass market," said Mike Hara, Nvidia vice president of investor relations. "We're moving at a rapid rate toward enabling people to do on a PC what people are able to do in cinema today."

Thanks AnandTech.