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linked at the bottom of that article but here (in German but screenshots speak for themselves), the quoted ATI rep basically admits it too by saying that they optimize for the best "visual experience" where that's some mix of visual fidelity, framerate, etc.

Cheating? nVidia? You mean like this?

That article is all about nVidias latest little shortcut. Rather than do linear interpolation between mip-map levels, they've introduced little plateaus where they only sample one mip-map level. It saves on the amount of memory bandwidth they have to use when reading a texture.

The thing that I find strangest about this little 'optimization', is that the GeForce FXs have heaps and heaps of memory bandwidth. It's not the area they really have to work on.

Well, after seeing the future mark scores, it looked to me as nvidia fx chips are blowing away ati and its gf4 line.

But I found a really nice german benchmark site 3dcenter.org that had to be the best benchmarks ive ever seen, they actually use the games on each and lists the fps.

Looks like the FX/GF4 5200/4200 4600/5600 (non ultra) are the same. And the ATI 9700PRO/9800 are faster than the 5800 Ultra.

After reading these benchmarks, you can really tell nvidia tweaked the SHIT out its drivers for futuremark...

I can't stand that the GeForce 4 is hardly an upgrade from the GeForce 3. According to the Inquirer, ATI is calling it the GeForce 3.5 (heh heh) because the chip really hasn't changed that much aside from the extra vector shader. Here's the article. And here are screenshots from an interesteing Powerpoint Presentation given by ATI. ATI accuses nVidia of "artificially keeping prices up by re-naming the same products."