Nvidia caught cheating 3D Mark scores

Interesting article:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1086025,00.asp

I'd heard rumbles of this before that Nvidia were messing with the drivers to get better 3D Mark scores (who would have theought they would carry so much wieght?). However this step by step disection is quite interesting, one wonders what the potential "knock-on" could be...

Either the benchmarks need to get much cleverer to be effective, or maybe people will stop getting quite so excited about benchmark scores.

Darkheart

Shouldn't this be in the off topic section?

This might explain few things... read the .PDF:

http://discuss.futuremark.com/forum/showflat.pl?Cat=&Board=announcementssite&Number=2286207&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=0&fpart=1

Very interesting, thanks Mustang.

BTW, re-reading my post it looks like the "Who would have thought they would carry so much wieght", is a bit insulting. The comment was in retrospect to when 3DMARK started rather than the obvious stature it has today.

Darkheart

Didn't nVidia recently withdraw support for 3DMark after ATI's cards started getting better scores on the 2003 version of 3DMark?

I guess that (a) NVidia has decided that its cheating is insufficiently effective, and (b) they are trying to reduce the respectability of 3D Mark.

I've always thought that in the "good old days" ATI and 3dfx rendered *prettier* than NVidia, but NVidia rendered *faster*. These days 3dfx is gone, and ATI and NVidia are each rendering fast and pretty. Who cares as long as the competition continues? I remember paying $200 for my first voodoo card...

Here's what Carmack said about the issue yesterday:



http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=65617&cid=6051216

> Shouldn't this be in the off topic section?

Well it's about 3D graphics. Unless we need a MISC 3D Graphics Forum and Blitz 3D Graphics Forum.