Nvidia Cheats Identified!!!!

[Tagrineth]

3dmark is a worthless piece of crap for determining the performance of a product as it is purely synthetic and will give you no idea how the card will perform in actual games. That is why it sucks. I use actual games for benchmarking just like I am with my review

I said relative performance, and it is pretty true a lot of the time.

And again, it can give an indication of an architecture's strengths and weaknesses.

I never said it could indicate game performance.

Ok, so if its acceptable to make driver specific optimizations for any given application, e.g. quake3, then whats wrong with making a driver optimization for a benchmark?

For a game: You're PLAYING the game. You want the highest frame rate you can GET.

For a benchmark: Ideally, synthetic benchmarks should never be special-cased, because they're supposed to present a level playing field.

I mean it can't be all that bad to artificialy increase the framerate in a benchmark application if its ok to artificialy increase the the framerate in a game. Doing one or the other has the same effect.

Something you people should consider, if somebody says that a company is cheating, you shouldn't denie it on their behalf because odds are its probably true. Big companies like this cheat all the time, especialy in the IT industry where competition is fierce. Anybody care to mention why the hell something as stupid as the winmodem was invented?

The other thing, is that with nVidia's 3DMark03 cheat, they weren't rendering ANYTHING other than what was being displayed. I mean that literally. Using the developer's version, you can go 'off the rails' of the demo and check out other stuff - but on the nVidia cheat drivers, going 'off the rails' resulted in the video buffers not clearing and nothing being rendered (sorta like using no-clipping in DOOM, and going off the edge of the level)... on ATi hardware, going off the rails had no problems at all.

THAT is the nVidia cheat. They basically replaced the entire 3DMark03 benchmark with their own, equivalent but restricted rendering path. That literally isn't possible in any playable games.

 

[vampireuk]

Which is why 3dmark should be scrapped as a benchmark and the dev teams should work more on improving game performance instead of spending so much time on something that has no benefi.

 

[AlphaWolf]

For a game: You're PLAYING the game. You want the highest frame rate you can GET.

Ah, I like that idea. So lets set all tell nvidia and ATI that we prefer our games in wireframe mode because it gets better frame rates.

The other thing, is that with nVidia's 3DMark03 cheat, they weren't rendering ANYTHING other than what was being displayed.

Isn't that a good way to get better frame rates in games too?

 

[Cyberman]

I prefer Anandtech's testing methods, it gived real features and failures of the FX series. Basically they have the best set of tests to use. I'm sure Nvidia was cheating but.. everyone seems to try it. It's the thing, you know instead of saying 'yeah it sucks here and here but otherwise it does fine' we follow the cover your arse concept. I wouldn't mind making mistakes so much if people who were boses weren't such idiots too. I'm not joking. It's like 'you can't make a mistake I won't allow you!' When doing something no one else has done before, 'needs 5 years experience!'. What has come of the human race? Geeze.

Bottom line it's indicative of the state of human nature. As someone my father knew said "When all else fails LIE." He had worked on nuclear submarines.. AHEM.

Cyb

 

[AlphaWolf]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/3/30880.html

 

[Tagrineth]

Ah, I like that idea. So lets set all tell nvidia and ATI that we prefer our games in wireframe mode because it gets better frame rates.

Name some games that deliberately lost IQ for visual quality. And don't say Quake3 on ATi; that was an accident by ATi and was immediately fixed.

Isn't that a good way to get better frame rates in games too?

No. I said in that very post, it isn't physically possible to do what nVidia did in 3DMark03, in any game. nVidia made their own custom path that mimicked the default 3DMark03 run; moving off that path resulted in null rendering (the vid card wasn't even clearing the frame buffer!). Would you like it if, in a game, moving off some pre-defined path resulted in null flags? (think turning off clipping in DOOM and moving off the level)

--------------------

There's another difference between nVidia's cheating and ATi's "Cheating" - nVidia still insists it was a bug, and/or that Futuremark was deliberately painting a poor performance picture on nV hardware, while ATi immediately addressed the Quake3 problem, admitted a mistake was in the driver that was causing the LOD to be misread, and they fixed it immediately. And now, with 3DMark03, ATi was found optimising a shader in Mother Nature (8% performance boost in MN, but less than 2% gained on overall score), and they again immediately issued a statement that they were re-optimising the shader for their architecture (it was mathematically equivalent, but still not Futuremark's shader), and plan to remove their optimisation from future drivers.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Name some games that deliberately lost IQ for visual quality. And don't say Quake3 on ATi; that was an accident by ATi and was immediately fixed.

Hmm...lets see if I can recall here...Oh yeah, Quake3 on ATI.

There's another difference between nVidia's cheating and ATi's "Cheating" - nVidia still insists it was a bug.

Actualy no, nvidias official statement was that they would change the next driver revision, read that article I just posted. ATI reacted exactly the same way, at first they were calling a bug until they made an official press release, and said they would fix it in the next driver.

 

[AlphaWolf]

You know, I have just realized that every single die hard ATI fan used to be a die hard 3dfx fan, who was dead pissed over the fact that nvidia totaly mopped the floor with 3DFX's asses, then humiliatingly bought them out thereafter. Now they see ATI as their ultimate source of revenge on nvidia. Every single web forum or usenet forum I visit, ATI fans are always previous 3DFX fans, and have always hated nvidia. :happy:

And I'll be honest, I was a 3DFX fan at first, but nvidias cards just tore them up all the way, and when it comes to a quality product, I don't cling to sentiment over my favorite brand, I just get the best damn card available for the price, which happened to be nvidia by a long shot.

 

[vampireuk]

ATI may have the better product at the moment but at least most NVIDIA fans carry themselves with a little dignity.

 

[ra5555]

yep, I am no body's fan, and used to be obssessed about GF FX, but clearly ATI has a better product right now. FX5900 is not out yet, and with all the crazy cheats NVIDIA has put into the driver, who can trust them?

 

[Tagrineth]

Hmm...lets see if I can recall here...Oh yeah, Quake3 on ATI.

Dude. What the fuck. How do you know, say, without optimisations, those five targeted textures in Quake3 don't cause massive cache thrashing and would result in single-digit FPS? (HEY, it CAN happen you know!)

In cases like that, WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH A TARGETED OPTIMISATION?!

I mean, honestly. Even 3DLabs, on their professional-only cards, have application-specific settings and targets for various pro apps.

ATi's Quake3 fubar textures was an accident, caused by a Radeon R6 optimisation that more or less failed to work correctly on the brand new R200 core. And again, it was immediately fixed, and ATi issued an immediate apology for the mistake. Not only that, but the driver which fixed the optimisation also improved performance even farther.

Actualy no, nvidias official statement was that they would change the next driver revision, read that article I just posted. ATI reacted exactly the same way, at first they were calling a bug until they made an official press release, and said they would fix it in the next driver.

Again, the fuck? I just read that article and I don't see any statement by nVidia admitting they made a mistake.


And finally, according to the article you so kindly supplied... a statement by ATi's Chris Evenden:

So everything's fine and dandy - ATI's driver tweaks are above board and 'legal'. Yet Evenden went on to say: "However, we recognise that these [tweaks] can be used by some people to call into question the legitimacy of benchmark results, and so we are removing them from our driver as soon as is physically possible. We expect them to be gone by the next release of Catalyst."

That's the only IHV statement I see anywhere in that entire article. And it's ATi, not nVidia.

Trust me on this, nVidia's statement is a rather mean-spirited one. I'm a majour 'force' (so to speak) at Beyond3D, and with some things (i.e. this), I do know what I'm talking about.


----------------------Aside:

You know, I have just realized that every single die hard ATI fan used to be a die hard 3dfx fan, who was dead pissed over the fact that nvidia totaly mopped the floor with 3DFX's asses, then humiliatingly bought them out thereafter. Now they see ATI as their ultimate source of revenge on nvidia. Every single web forum or usenet forum I visit, ATI fans are always previous 3DFX fans, and have always hated nvidia.

Hang around Rage3D for a while. Not all ATi fans are former 3dfx zealots. Admittedly, ATi is a good outlet for the people who realise that nVidia has always been a rotten company, that they've always used the same anti-everyone-else tactics, and that they've never played fair, unlike the other IHV's. But I digress.

 

[AlphaWolf]

Bah, your just a fangirl You won't listen to anything negative about ATI.

 

[Tagrineth]

Bah, your just a fangirl You won't listen to anything negative about ATI.

I can say the reverse for you. =) I had valid counters for all your arguments, and you didn't. NYAA NYAA! :saint:

Let's just call it even on this one. I can see how the Quake3 thing can be considered an obvious cheat, but again, the image quality loss wasn't intentional.

Oh well, whatever. :flowers:

 

[AlphaWolf]

I can say the reverse for you. =) I had valid counters for all your arguments, and you didn't. NYAA NYAA! :saint:

Nah, I just didn't bother

And besides, you can't say the same for me about nvidia. Read my last post on this page:

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportfo...essage.id=80096&view=by_date_ascending&page=2

 

[ra5555]

An interesting read...
"John Carmack Speaks Out On Nvidia/Futuremark Fiasco "
http://www.tomshardware.com/technews/20030528_044243.html

 

[vampireuk]

Hang around Rage3D for a while. Not all ATi fans are former 3dfx zealots. Admittedly, ATi is a good outlet for the people who realise that nVidia has always been a rotten company, that they've always used the same anti-everyone-else tactics, and that they've never played fair, unlike the other IHV's. But I digress.

Oh yeah Rage is just a haven for perfect people, that place has so many god damn losers its pathetic. Atilover that guy is a god damn moron. He was banned from nvnews for trolling so he registered again and started posting porn images. NVIDIA are not a bad company they have just had shitty pr agents screwing everything up. But for a fangirl that has to be hard to swallow

Rage has some good people on there but it is too heavily populated by complete morons

 

[AlphaWolf]

I remember when nvidia first came around, that was when you were first able to buy a 3d card that didn't have washed out texture colors when it did bilinear filtering. Even the voodoo4 still had washed out colors, and they also had very shitty 2d. 3dfx got owned because they just plain sucked and didn't change their ways. And all companies are "anti-everyone else", thats what competition is :satisfied

 

[vampireuk]

Well said Alpha:satisfied

As for their optimisations, they should not have been targeted at a benchmark. Fine do them for games because they give extra performance, but they should not be used for benchmarking. Both sides were in the wrong as they both affected 3Dmark, Tag ease up a lot of ATI fans have expressed their concern over ATI doing this too

 

[Eagle]

ATI may have the better product at the moment but at least most NVIDIA fans carry themselves with a little dignity.

Bah, your just a fangirl You won't listen to anything negative about ATI.

OK, If there is one thing I hate its threads where people constantly try to convince people of something that they already have a dead set opinon on. The fact is, half of you like Nvidia and you arent going to change your minds. The other half like ATI and you arent going to change your minds. Its like a Rabbi trying to convince the pope to be jewish all the while the pope is trying to convince the rabbi to be catholic. Its never gonna happen and so we start bickering until we dont remember what the conversation was about which has now escalated into an argument.

I'm closing this thread and I dont ever want to see another thread in here titled NVIDIA Cheats, ATI Sucks, Intel screws up again, or anything similar. If you have something to post, make sure its objective and has some fact behind it and post it in a dignified manner, otherwise keep it to yourself.

 

[vampireuk]

I thought the pope was jewish?:satisfied