nVidia camp in sorry state

Hey all,

Just thought i'd get some opinions on all this cheating where nVidia and 3dmark are concerned.

To fill in those who don't already know, recently nvidia was found to be cheating in 3DMark by not properly rendering parts of the benchmark that are not visible (3DMark is on a fixed path) giving its geforce FX series an unfair advantage. Futuremark (the makers of 3DMark) released a patch and a joint statement with nvidia and all was well.

Except now it has been found that that wasn't the only cheat. Nvidia is using the trick that ATi used a few years ago with Quake. The drivers use the filename to implement their 'optimisations', if you change the name of the 3dmark executable the FX's performance drops.

i can hear ATi laughing from here!

What do you guys think about this?

do you have a link to a story or something? sorry... i didn't get enough detail out of your post...

im ati fan but dude they do the same thing

there was JUST a thread about this. A huge one. On this board. It can't be more than a few pages back.

oh ok.

Yeah, there was a thread a while back... but anyway. The newest cheat was actually discovered by ATI! What it does is when certain programs: Quake 3, 3DMark '03, Splinter Cell, etc... are run from their standard filenames the drivers "optimize" the way it is run.

One of these application oriented cheats has to do with Aniostropic Filtering. When certain apps are run with 8x AF the drivers automatically drop is down to approx. 2x AF, obviously beefing up the score/framerate in the process. When the executable is changed to another name, such as Quack 3 or 3DMurk, the drivers are forced to run in exactly the mode they were set in software, 8x AF.


Oh, and this cheat was originally done by ATI oh so many years ago :p

thats why you dont just rely on benchmarks. actual game performance counts too...too many people just look at benchmarks.

Quote:

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Originally posted by the Wookie
thats why you dont just rely on benchmarks. actual game performance counts too...too many people just look at benchmarks.

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With this cheat even game performance doesn't matter. That's the whole point. The drivers will reduce quality in ANY application, regardless of if it's a benchmark or game, that it see's fit. Despite what the user chooses... I don't have a list of all the games that are affected by this cheat, but I already listed Quake 3 (who would play that on an FX card anyway?) and Splinter Cell (AA doesn't work on ATI either).

I think he meant go with the one that you like best while playing your games.