Well what can I say? I am lost for words. Someone once told me that if you live long enough, you'll be amazed at what you'll see and boy he wasn't joking either! The day has finally arrived: In the light of this, Futuremark now states that Nvidia's driver design is an application specific optimization and not a cheat. I think this says it all: Cheating Drivers Hidden Dragon.
I must of been asleep last week when Nvidia Accuses Futuremark Of Developing Unfair Benchmarks or FutureMark's 3DMark Audit Report was released or when the good old boy's Dave Baumann and the Reverend at Beyond3D chatted to Tim Sweeney at Epic and to ATI's Director of PR, Christ Evenden about cheating and optimizations brought up by Nvidia's Detonator FX 44.03.
Well we all know Nvidia cheated and so did ATI but like you and me ATI owned up the their optimizations will remove the optimizations in there next release of their CATALYST drivers! Nvidia on the other hand have gone the other way: Do what ever it takes to say we didn't cheat! So here's your chance to tell FutureMark & Nvidia what you think of their statement! Just like these Guy's: Benchmarking Wrong: HardOCP editorial that takes a look at the underlying issues surrounding 3DMark03 and the reasons you or any company should not take it too seriously.
CATALYST Maker Replies To FutureMark's New Stance: Nvidia Didn't Cheat At DH: Very sad. And here we are struggling to remove our 1.9% optimization to make everything clean and by the rules.
Im going to have an interesting set of meetings tomorrow at work. Guess it's time to investigate how we can get CATALYST to clip planes and render less than 50% than we have to. That should give us an extra 25% performance!
I'm pretty upset right now. Cant wait to go to work tomorrow and find out how this happened.
3DMark Producer's, Patric Ojala, Has Written A Small Q&A In The Beyond3D Forum In Relation To The Joint Statement At Beyond3D: Q: Does this mean what you called originally as "cheats" actually were acceptable "optimizations", and that you made a wrong decicion in releasing Patch 330 and the Audit Report?
A: By the definition of our benchmark and process, the optimizations are not acceptable. 3DMark scores are only comparable if drivers perform exactly the work 3DMark instructs them to do.
As earlier stated, we recommend using the latest build 330 of 3DMark03, with the 44.03 (or 43.51 WHQL) Nvidia drivers, or the Catalyst 3.4 ATI drivers. This way obtained 3DMark03 results are genuinely comparable as far as we know.
Q: Does this mean that in the future you will not make patches for 3DMark03 (or 3DMark2001) in order to reveal cheating?
A: We might release further patches to 3DMark03, if a need for preventing driver optimizations appear in the future.
See also: Penny-arcade.com
I must of been asleep last week when Nvidia Accuses Futuremark Of Developing Unfair Benchmarks or FutureMark's 3DMark Audit Report was released or when the good old boy's Dave Baumann and the Reverend at Beyond3D chatted to Tim Sweeney at Epic and to ATI's Director of PR, Christ Evenden about cheating and optimizations brought up by Nvidia's Detonator FX 44.03.
Well we all know Nvidia cheated and so did ATI but like you and me ATI owned up the their optimizations will remove the optimizations in there next release of their CATALYST drivers! Nvidia on the other hand have gone the other way: Do what ever it takes to say we didn't cheat! So here's your chance to tell FutureMark & Nvidia what you think of their statement! Just like these Guy's: Benchmarking Wrong: HardOCP editorial that takes a look at the underlying issues surrounding 3DMark03 and the reasons you or any company should not take it too seriously.
CATALYST Maker Replies To FutureMark's New Stance: Nvidia Didn't Cheat At DH: Very sad. And here we are struggling to remove our 1.9% optimization to make everything clean and by the rules.
Im going to have an interesting set of meetings tomorrow at work. Guess it's time to investigate how we can get CATALYST to clip planes and render less than 50% than we have to. That should give us an extra 25% performance!
I'm pretty upset right now. Cant wait to go to work tomorrow and find out how this happened.
3DMark Producer's, Patric Ojala, Has Written A Small Q&A In The Beyond3D Forum In Relation To The Joint Statement At Beyond3D: Q: Does this mean what you called originally as "cheats" actually were acceptable "optimizations", and that you made a wrong decicion in releasing Patch 330 and the Audit Report?
A: By the definition of our benchmark and process, the optimizations are not acceptable. 3DMark scores are only comparable if drivers perform exactly the work 3DMark instructs them to do.
As earlier stated, we recommend using the latest build 330 of 3DMark03, with the 44.03 (or 43.51 WHQL) Nvidia drivers, or the Catalyst 3.4 ATI drivers. This way obtained 3DMark03 results are genuinely comparable as far as we know.
Q: Does this mean that in the future you will not make patches for 3DMark03 (or 3DMark2001) in order to reveal cheating?
A: We might release further patches to 3DMark03, if a need for preventing driver optimizations appear in the future.
See also: Penny-arcade.com
