Tagrineth
Dragony thingy
vampireuk said: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.
AlphaWolf said: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.