the the frame rates really jump not having to draw that dragon :p~

That's an optimization! Just 'cause nVidia has found a way to not render the dragon does NOT make it cheating! Besides, do you PLAY 3dm2k1se? I think we should all thank nVidia for showing us how easy it is to invalidate a benchmark and how useless they are...we all know that they dropped out of 3dm2k3 because they wanted to concentrate on REAL games and not benchmarks. In fact they STATED that they would no longer optimize their drivers for benchmarks and that was a LOOOOOONG time before the FX drivers came out!!!! YOUR ALL ATI FANBOYS IF YOU THINK OTHERWISE!!!!! (Ok, just had to get that out of me system...I've been listening to people use the above stupid arguments over at www.nvnews.net for the last couple of days now and wanted to get 'em all up before I posted this over there and the nVidiots all jump on it...I figure it out to knock 'em off their stride... ;) )

Methinks your knee jerk fanboy reaction there is in part due to the earlier story and the spin the nVidia camp is trying to put on it. 1. I think nVidia is flat-out BUSTED for intentional cheating at 3dm2k3, and I think it was really stupid of them because the NV35 is a good card that could have stood up just fine on it's own two legs. (So to speak.) 2. I think they did it intentionally and to inflate their 3dm2k3 score which I find incredibly hypocritical since they sure as hell flaunted their fradulantly inflated score as a major "win" for their new card. 3. I do NOT think that they might have some secret agenda to show how inaccurate 3dm2k3 really is in this act as it's being suggested. It's a bloody silly argument! Then why did they go parading their score over the 9800 Pro so much? 4. I think the fact that nVidia has NOT made any comments/responses on this is indicative of guilt on their behalf. Not conclusive evidence by any means, but just a considerable factor to me the longer they remain quiet. It takes a lot longer to come up with a good excuse/lie than it does to tell the truth. 5. I kind of think the disapearing dragon thing really does have a good chance of being an honest bug. It just seems a little weird the circumstances it vanishes on and even I don't think nVidia's hubris is such that they'd think they could get away with that. Clip planes are damned hard to see, a missing dragon you tend to notice. ;)

Methinks your knee jerk fanboy reaction there is in part due to the earlier story and the spin the nVidia camp is trying to put on it. 1. I think nVidia is flat-out BUSTED for intentional cheating at 3dm2k3, and I think it was really stupid of them because the NV35 is a good card that could have stood up just fine on it's own two legs. (So to speak.) 2. I think they did it intentionally and to inflate their 3dm2k3 score which I find incredibly hypocritical since they sure as hell flaunted their fradulantly inflated score as a major "win" for their new card. 3. I do NOT think that they might have some secret agenda to show how inaccurate 3dm2k3 really is in this act as it's being suggested. It's a bloody silly argument! Then why did they go parading their score over the 9800 Pro so much? 4. I think the fact that nVidia has NOT made any comments/responses on this is indicative of guilt on their behalf. Not conclusive evidence by any means, but just a considerable factor to me the longer they remain quiet. It takes a lot longer to come up with a good excuse/lie than it does to tell the truth. 5. I kind of think the disapearing dragon thing really does have a good chance of being an honest bug. It just seems a little weird the circumstances it vanishes on and even I don't think nVidia's hubris is such that they'd think they could get away with that. Clip planes are damned hard to see, a missing dragon you tend to notice. ;)

I think it really is a bug this time because it happens on a ti4600 also, i was really disappointed with the performance and rendering quality with the 5200 cards before the current drive, but now rendering quality and framerates in real world games has greatly improved with the Det FX. I am asked daily in my job for recommendations on video cards in different price ranges. And being a technician for a major retail store i've had the opportunity to do back to back comparisons for myself on fairly high end equipment of the 5200 Ultra vs a 9100 128MB and before with the driver that ships with the card, and forcing trilinear filtering the 5200 Ultra was severly outperformed by the ATi 9100, by a factor of about 30% and the rendering issues the card had under UT2003 with trilinear filterng would have to be seen in motion to truely understand why i was so against this card, but with the DetFX drivers the real world performance and Image Quality has skyrocketed to the point that i recommend this card to customers with the disclaimer: Do no use the drivers on the disc, go to nvidias website and get the new ones. But as far as cheating in benchmarks, i can't say i agree with it, but in all actuallity how fun is a benchmark, load up Ut2003 or Enter The Matrix and play the game. I'm not defending the cheating by any means but at least the drivers fixed what was really important real world gaming performance and Image Quality issues. I instaled a 5200 Pci with the newest drivers in a friends computer and he could not be more happy after replacing his Radeon 7500 Pci. Thankfully i don't have to worry about this with my 9700 Pro ;)

i recall the nvidiots was very confident in the benchmarks when nvidia was the 'king'

i didnt think you previous statement was much like you anyways dig ;P nvidia is just against the 2k3 benchmark because it uses 1.4 pixelshaders that are dx 8.1 compliant instead of nvidia's 1.3 shaders that are slower. and using the common 1.1 plaform as a fallback. 1.1 and 1.3 isnt that far apart performancewise. it only makes sence for futuremark to make a benchmark that utilises current tech instead of old ones. its not their fault that nvidia didnt want to implement PS 1.4 because ATi made the specifications.

lol this is not cheating.. i've seen things dissapear often enough on my age old Radeon 64 vivo. the path optimizing in 3dmark 2k3 is suspicious, but this would be a lame way to optimise. next they remove everything and just renders the skybox? naaah