FutureMark will soon say just how far graphics chip companies can go to optimise their drivers to improve their 3DMark scores.
The move follows the fight between the benchmark company and NVIDIA earlier this year. Having tweaked its drivers to improve 3DMark scores - widely believed to be at the expense of image quality - NVIDIA was accused by FutureMark of cheating. FutureMark later retracted much of its initial criticism, stating that NVIDIA has convinced it that the drivers weren't cheats but application-specific optimisations - a highly subtle distinction at best. At what point does an optimisation become a cheat? Presumably when the performance gain is made at the expense of some other desirable quality. Plenty of users certainly felt that NVIDIA had stepped beyond that line with its driver tweaks. NVIDIA, understandably, claimed it hadn't.
Source : The Register
The move follows the fight between the benchmark company and NVIDIA earlier this year. Having tweaked its drivers to improve 3DMark scores - widely believed to be at the expense of image quality - NVIDIA was accused by FutureMark of cheating. FutureMark later retracted much of its initial criticism, stating that NVIDIA has convinced it that the drivers weren't cheats but application-specific optimisations - a highly subtle distinction at best. At what point does an optimisation become a cheat? Presumably when the performance gain is made at the expense of some other desirable quality. Plenty of users certainly felt that NVIDIA had stepped beyond that line with its driver tweaks. NVIDIA, understandably, claimed it hadn't.
Source : The Register
