Slashdot Mirror

The benchmark heavily favours DX-9 parts and NVDA's existing lineup was/is getting smoked in the benchmark by it's main (only) competitor. They decided to go on the offensive and try to kill off this benchmark. The 30 person company that produces 3D Mark have stood their ground against the multi-billion dollar NVDA. NVDA instead of admitting that their Pixel Shader is quite slow when running against 2.0 specs insteads tries to decieve and FUD their way out of it.

other people have mentioned this, but take a look at hardocp's 3dmark03 article. nvidia's speed with dx9 pixel shaders isn't measured in most of the tests, so the benchmark is largely irrelevant to all those arguments.

personally, i get the feeling that futuremark is embarrassed that nvidia found it so trivial to cheat in their benchmark and are trying to save face. but that's just my take on the whole thing.

Hardocp

They do a good job of disecting the benchmark, and I'd have to agree that as a DX9 benchmark it fails.

Whatever, it's still just a synthetic mark and nothing more.

Let's not jump on nVidia too harshly for this. Sure, this spectacle seems to have gained a lot more publicity than ATi's own cheating ( link link link ). At least when nVidia cheated in 3DMark, they publically denounced synthetic benchmarks.

If you want better

[Next Page]

reviews that

[Next Page]

don't read like Cat in

[Next Page]

the Hat with ads, you

[Next Page]

should try

[Next Page]

AnandTech or ExtremeTech or even HardOCP.

3DMark03 is such an unreliable and poorly programmed piece of code that it is all but completely useless as a benchmark. This was not an attempt at artificially inflating 3DMark scores it was simply a bug in the drivers that affected the calculations when clipping and culling.

I think that Kyle at HardOCP said it best when discussing this issue he said "Finding a driver bug is one thing, but concluding motive is another." Look up his comments on Thursday May 15, 2003 if you want to read more.

From what I read from [h]ardOCP's benchmark with doom3 It kills nvidia's card. And who cares aren't you suppose to optimize your card?

They also have another benchmark here where they compare the 5900 ultra and the radeon 9800 pro. In that article it says that NVIDIA told them not to use 3DMark03 I recommend reading that article

From what I read from [h]ardOCP's benchmark with doom3 It kills nvidia's card. And who cares aren't you suppose to optimize your card?

They also have another benchmark here where they compare the 5900 ultra and the radeon 9800 pro. In that article it says that NVIDIA told them not to use 3DMark03 I recommend reading that article

I thought that ATI did the same with their Radeon 8500 drivers 2 years ago, making their Quake 3 scores look better by "cheating". Isn't that just status quo in the video card manufactoring world.

The latest driver release on ATI's page is Catalyst 3.2 and it is very stable and runs Doom 3 well above 10 fps. The Catalyst 3.4 drivers obviously have a problem with Doom 3 but who gives a sh*t? They have until at least August to get that worked out and there is no reason to think they won't fix it since it was working well before. As for overall driver stability I'll refer again to HardOCP; "ATI's Catalyst 3.4 drivers are very solid as well. We experienced no driver problems whatsoever with these drivers."

ATI has always had and still has the buggiest drivers of any video card costing more than $15. They have screwed me again and again over the last 10 years as I constantly think "Well maybe this time they got it right" only to have them kick me in the nuts once more.

Did you ever consider the possibility that you are just a moron? Anybody who has had that many problems with one company in 10 years is either stupid for not getting things to work correctly or stupid for continuing to use the company's products given past performance. Given the fact that recent reviews have ATI receiving many more compliments than criticisms about driver quality, I would say you are the former.

The latest driver release on ATI's page is Catalyst 3.2 and it is very stable and runs Doom 3 well above 10 fps. The Catalyst 3.4 drivers obviously have a problem with Doom 3 but who gives a sh*t? They have until at least August to get that worked out and there is no reason to think they won't fix it since it was working well before. As for overall driver stability I'll refer again to HardOCP; "ATI's Catalyst 3.4 drivers are very solid as well. We experienced no driver problems whatsoever with these drivers."

ATI has always had and still has the buggiest drivers of any video card costing more than $15. They have screwed me again and again over the last 10 years as I constantly think "Well maybe this time they got it right" only to have them kick me in the nuts once more.

Did you ever consider the possibility that you are just a moron? Anybody who has had that many problems with one company in 10 years is either stupid for not getting things to work correctly or stupid for continuing to use the company's products given past performance. Given the fact that recent reviews have ATI receiving many more compliments than criticisms about driver quality, I would say you are the former.

hardocp.com on the front page has a great writeup on this.

But basically, extremetek is just a little bit mad because they were excluded from the doom3 benchmarks. Since nvidia refused to pay the 10s of thousands of dollars to be a member of the 3dmark03 board, they have absolutely no access to the software used to create this bug.

Here is the full exept from hardocp.com:

3DMark Invalid?
Two days after Extremetech was not given the opportunity to benchmark DOOM3, they come out swinging heavy charges of NVIDIA intentionally inflating benchmark scores in 3DMark03. What is interesting here is that Extremetech uses tools not at NVIDIA's disposal to uncover the reason behind the score inflations. These tools are not "given" to NVIDIA anymore as the will not pay the tens of thousands of dollars required to be on the "beta program" for 3DMark "membership".

nVidia believes that the GeForceFX 5900 Ultra is trying to do intelligent culling and clipping to reduce its rendering workload, but that the code may be performing some incorrect operations. Because nVidia is not currently a member of FutureMark's beta program, it does not have access to the developer version of 3DMark2003 that we used to uncover these issues.

I am pretty sure you will see many uninformed sites jumping on the news reporting bandwagon today with "NVIDIA Cheating" headlines. Give me a moment to hit this from a different angle.

First off it is heavily rumored that Extremetech is very upset with NVIDIA at the moment as they were excluded from the DOOM3 benchmarks on Monday and that a bit of angst might have precipitated the article at ET, as I was told about their research a while ago. They have made this statement:

We believe nVidia may be unfairly reducing the benchmark workload to increase its score on 3DMark2003. nVidia, as we've stated above, is attributing what we found to a bug in their driver.

Finding a driver bug is one thing, but concluding motive is another.

Conversely, our own Brent Justice found a NVIDIA driver bug last week using our UT2K3 benchmark that slanted the scores heavily towards ATI. Are we to conclude that NVIDIA was unfairly increasing the workload to decrease its UT2K3 score? I have a feeling that Et has some motives of their own that might make a good story.

Please don't misunderstand me. Et has done some good work here. I am not in a position to conclude motive in their actions, but one thing is for sure.

3DMark03 scores generated by the game demos are far from valid in our opinion. Our reviewers have now been instructed to not use any of the 3DMark03 game demos in card evaluations, as those are the section of the test that would be focused on for optimizations. I think this just goes a bit further showing how worthless the 3DMark bulk score really is.

The first thing that came to mind when I heard about this, was to wonder if NVIDIA was not doing it on purpose to invalidate the 3DMark03 scores by showing how the it could be easily manipulated.

Thanks for reading our thoughts; I wanted to share with you a bit different angle than all those guys that will be sharing with you their in-depth "NVIDIA CHEATING" posts. While our thoughts on this will surely upset some of you, especially the fanATIics, I hope that it will at least let you possibly look at a clouded issue through from a different perspective.

Further on the topics of benchmarks, we addressed them earlier this year, which you might find to be an interesting read.

We have also shared the following documentation with ATI and NVIDIA while working with both of them to hopefully start getting better and more in-game benchmarking tools. Please feel free to take the documentation below and use it as you see fit. If you need a Word document, please drop me a mail and let me know what you are trying to do please.

Benchmarking Benefiting Gamers

Objective: To gain reliable benchmarking and image quality tools

The fan is still functional. I plan to pop a cheap duron in the MB soon enough for a Linux box. Until then, I'm going to find creative ways to use my defunct athlons. Perhaps they'll make a nice pair of earrings, as a belated Mother's Day gift.... : /

HardOCP too.

Also HardOCP has a review with Doom 3 benchmarks.

I sort of did a redundant post about anandtech and tomshardware earlier, my bad.

Also HardOCP has a review with Doom 3 benchmarks.

I sort of did a redundant post about anandtech and tomshardware earlier, my bad.

Hello,

It's important to keep in mind that just like automobile manufacturers, motherboard manufacturers make products targeted at different markets.

Just as automobile enthusiasts replace stock carburetors and transmissions with performance parts, overbore engines, modify ECUs and so forth, computer enthusiasts tweak their BIOSes, replace stock heatsinks with watercooling, use rounded cables, et cetera.

But for the overwhelming majority of automobile or computer users out there, they get by just fine on with their Fords or Chevys or Dells or Gateways. While Ferraris and Falcon Northwests are fast, how often is the average driver going to need to go 150MPH or get involved in a lanparty frag-fest? It's important to keep in perspective that the overwhelming majority of automobile and computer drivers perform routine tasks like driving back and forth from work, word processing, going down to the corner grocery, web surfing, and so forth. And for those types of activities, a Saturn or eMachine is going to do the job just as well as the most exotic car or PC you can imagine.

Having worked around average (read: non-computer industry) computer users long enough, I can tell you that they just don't care about what brand of CPU or type of memory their computer has, much less its CAS and RAS timings. They just want something that's inexpensive and reliable.

This is the market that Intel goes after for its motherboards. Not necessarily the end users themselves--I would imagine Intel's retail motherboard sales account for a small percentage of total motherboard sales compared to their OEM sales--but the companies who make those mass-market computers. And for those end users, that's fine. They'll probably never play a video game more challenging than Solitaire just like they'll never drive more than 120MPH. And they're more concerned about being able to get work done on their computer or getting to the dry cleaners on time to pick up the laundry then burning out a CPU or cracking an engine block.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

When I read the article text submitted by SoDaLaS, I realized I had read it before. Look for [H]ardOCP's news about the Athlon XP 3200+ posted yesterday at 11:50am.

From HardOCP [H]ardNews 6th Edition posted on Wednesday April 30th, 2003:

Athlon 3200+ Coming:
The Athlon 3200+ with a 400MHz FSB is on the way in the next two weeks, according to C|Net. It'll be interesting to see how well the processor overclocks at that high of a bus speed...it didn't seem to hamper the new 800MHz FSB Pentium 4, which many people were worried about too.

I think Steve at [H]ardOCP has a mother who is blind and uses the computer. I'm not sure how much help is needed for her to use it, but he may be able to give you a reality check on what to expect.

too bad you stole the headline from HardOcp

Yes but the first ones wont ship with an agp slot :( I know arima and MSI have retail boards (soon?) availible. look here, about halfway down

Oops, here's the fixed link.

You mean like these guys?

(though, I do agree with you)

Interesting nonetheless.

Interesting nonetheless.

Yeah, the guys over at HardOCP managed a stable overclock of a 3GHz P4 to 4.4Ghz, but it took them two tries. The first one they blew up at 4.2GHz, and the second one they managed to get to 4.4GHz stable but only with help of two Vapochill units (think refridgerator and you're getting there) as well as watercooling for the GPU.

That's the best clock I know of and I don't think anyone else has come close. Can anyone correct me? I'd be interested to see if that really was the fastest . . .

Yeah, the guys over at HardOCP managed a stable overclock of a 3GHz P4 to 4.4Ghz, but it took them two tries. The first one they blew up at 4.2GHz, and the second one they managed to get to 4.4GHz stable but only with help of two Vapochill units (think refridgerator and you're getting there) as well as watercooling for the GPU.

That's the best clock I know of and I don't think anyone else has come close. Can anyone correct me? I'd be interested to see if that really was the fastest . . .

Yeah, the guys over at HardOCP managed a stable overclock of a 3GHz P4 to 4.4Ghz, but it took them two tries. The first one they blew up at 4.2GHz, and the second one they managed to get to 4.4GHz stable but only with help of two Vapochill units (think refridgerator and you're getting there) as well as watercooling for the GPU.

That's the best clock I know of and I don't think anyone else has come close. Can anyone correct me? I'd be interested to see if that really was the fastest . . .

[H]ard|OCP usually raises a big stink if a company comes out with a stinker. I remember when there were some GeForce3 cards that were a little out of spec, and some of the capacitors on the card were rubbing up on capacitors on the mobo. They called the company and demanded that they explain why they messed up.

Granted, Kyle and crew do have their favorites, as it seems. Anything that has to do with a massive sized heatsink, or water cooling usually gets more air-time than the generic ship-with stuff. After reading their reviews tho, you get to know that they don't give any bullshit, nor will they praise a card just because it was given to them for free.

Seriously, has anyone tested nVidia's Dawn demo on a Radeon card?

Considering the poor perfomance on ShaderMark's DX9 test (and as mentioned at HardOCP) we may have a surprise.

The GeForce FX has some horrible Pixel shader performance using ShaderMark v1.7 as shown by HardOCP:

"In ShaderMark the GeForceFX pretty much terrible when it comes to pixel shader 2.0 performance compared to the 9700Pro and 9800Pro. Performance of the GeForceFX is horrible compared to what these cards are showing us. The 9800 Pro improves up to 50 FPS in some cases compared to the 9700 Pro. There is no doubt that the 9700 Pro and 9800 Pro have very strong pixel shader speed.

This benchmark also does give some credence to the 3DMark03 PS2.0 numbers.[my bold face] More PS2.0 coming next week that will really get you asking questions."

ATI did the same thing with their drivers and quake. Article on it

Has anyone stuck a PC in a Mac G3 B&W tower case?

Yes. Or was that a rhetorical question?

I'm not sure from where you got that. But HardOCP has an article claiming:

Further if you test in OpenGL compared to D3D in the CPU test the OpenGL results will be higher due to the fact that T&L is ENABLED for opengl, but it is DISABLED in Direct3D. Obviously you would want T&L disabled so the CPU does most of the work for a CPU test. Therefore if doing CPU speed comparisons we recommend using the Direct3D renderer.

Apparently, there is not that much of a difference, disregarding any T&L effect.

Hers's the [H]'s take on it, , and here's Sudhian's.

[H]ardOCP has confirmation that GeforceFX5800 Ultra graphics cards will not make it to retail, and are available as pre-order items only, for a limited time. However, the GeforceFX5800 non-ultra model *will* make it to retail, sans the elaborate cooling mechanism, and running at 400MHz GPU / 800MHz RAM.

Additionally, it seems the "Radeon9900" information at Xbitlabs might be less accurate than it appears.

This isn't the greatest news for Nvidia, but it doesn't exactly break the bank: Nvidia still has the lion's share of the graphics market, and will probably continue to keep that market simply due to Tier 1/2 OEM sales, as well as their reputation - even though ATI has faster hardware, Nvidia has had a history of rock-solid drivers 4 generations back. Although ATI's driver quality has improved significantly in recent times, they're still not up to par with Nvidia's. And be sure that Nvidia will capitalize on that, since they don't have bragging rights for their hardware currently.

What about "DVD-rot"?

[I] [T]hink [Y]ou [M]ay [H]ave [A] [C]opywright [V]iolation [I]n [T]he [F]irst [L]ine [O]f [T]he [S]tory?

This is from HardOCP.com:

It's 2:20 CST and I'm trying to activate a copy of XP. I need to, because this repair/upgrade (changed mb, disk controller, video, hdisk, NIC, RAM, USB revision, CPU, etc) I can't logon without activation.

Except, I CAN'T ACTIVATE. I am told there is no way ANY copy of XP can be activated in the next 5 hours because of (drum roll)

** Routine maintenance **. I mean, I asked: I said

"You don't have some little stand-alone machine that reads a DVD database so you could stand in line and do it?"

"You don't have a couple hundred "last resort" number ranges? You can call me back tomorrow!!!"

"There's not some guy you can go ask? Ya can't call Bill at home?"

So, I gotta stop my project for some unknown length of time. Good thing I'm not updating a medical drug interaction database, or an available transplant database, or a process flow control system or a hazardous atmosphere measurement system or a BUNCH of other possibilities. In my case, either I miss the superbowl, or my car dealer can't find and order Volvo cars on Monday. Life will continue.

But, I'm still seriously pissed. Call 'em at 888-571-2048 and try for activation.

And let's think about the true meaning of the fact you can't release liability for the consequential damage resulting from negligence. I mean, I have NEVER heard about "routine maintenance" on the 24.7.365 activation promise...

Well, on to the next job...

They've got a man who may or may not have the goods. If he hops next door and finds out anything interesting, they'll be the first to give us the lowdown (that it's a PC running emulators for old consoles).

Here's another link to the EE Times: http://www.eetimes.com/semi/news/OEG20030108S0038 (care of [H]ard|OCP)

Hopefully this means that the next CPUs out of AMD won't be able to warm up the apartment come winter.

Generally this means that AMD won't be working with United Microelectronics (UMC) anymore... a contract that was just recently made (January). (EE Times hints that IBM has been "muscling in" on UMC's turf lately - ouch).

The deal apparently marks an end to AMD's arrangement with United Microelectronics Corp., a Taiwan-based foundry with which AMD was to develop process technology and build a 300-mm fabrication facility in Singapore. Asked about that earlier partnership, an AMD spokesman said the two sides "are amicably winding up their joint development relationship."

See info here, here, and here.

I doubt any GFX card company would dare try it again.

John B. Challinor II APR - Director, Public Relations at ATI Technologies Inc. "ATI optimizes its drivers on many different levels, including the application level, the game engine level, the API level, and the operating system level. That is, some optimizations work only on specific games, while others work only on specific game engines or only on specific operating systems. In the case of Quake III and Quake III Arena, we were able to achieve certain optimizations specifically for that game, as we do for other popular games. Our engineering team is committed to providing the best visual experience for the user in all applications, with the optimal combination of high frame rates, image quality, and stability."

did a google for "quack 3 video driver". 4th link is the article that started it all, on [H]ardOCP, its about the radeon 8500, so it's more recent than i thought.

here's the link

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTEx

Maybe this article about ATI's Radeon 9500Pro would have been a better one to link to. It shows how this cheaper R300 based product compares to other offerings and how it beats the Ti4200 hands down and often outdoes the Ti4600. It may not be the killer card that the 9700 is, and may not be a true entry level card, but for the mainstream gamer market it gives mighty fine performance for your cash.

As to people saying that AMD is dead if x86-64 doesn't work, I agree. They are basically betting the farm on the x86-64 chips. If they don't payoff, they'll most likely leave the desktop/server/whatever CPU market. They'll still be alive in microcontrollers and millions of other things, but they won't be competing with Intel for the CPU of your PC. If this happens, I'll be worried, becase we all know that we need a second big name in CPUs to keep prices in the "ludicrous and below" area.

BUT... if they don't take off on the PC side, the chip is still superior to the little 1.x GHz PPCs that Apple is using. If they could be the new chip for Apple, then they could stay in the CPU market, and Apple could get a major contender again (CPU wise). I'd love this to happen. OS X is already proted (according to rumors, and we know that the kernel already runs on x86s, so it would be fast ported to the -64s, especially by AMD). Software would be easy to port from PCs to Macs (no endianess mess). Even as just a failed market expirament, this could mean alot to Apple, AMD, and Intel.

All speculations, my opinions, and such. If you doubt me, send $200 to me and I'll consider your point of view better. The address is below....

(address cut due to excessive donations)
(WOOT!)

That's right, because as we all know, not only do most Linux users freely fork over 100+ dollars for a commercial OS they can easily pirate, but the support of a file format in one application is clearly what the entire OS and platform decision hinges on, never mind that Winamp3 supports .ogg flawlessly.

Taste of their own medicine - Poindexter gets TIA'ed.

asscroft writes "[H] has this scoop - The head of the government's Total Information Awareness project, which aims to root out potential terrorists by aggregating credit-card, travel, medical, school and other records of everyone in the United States, has himself become a target of personal data profiling. Wired has the article. The whole idea was started by Matt Smith, a columnist for SF Weekly. And the folks over at cryptome have continued on in fine fashion. Reminds me of the spammer getting spammed. If you have any dealings with mr. Poindexter yourself, you may want to "randomly" select him for security checks, whether you work in the airport, mcdonalds, ace hardware, etc. Let's remind this bozo why we have a 4th ammendment. and remember to support the EFF's efforts against TIA."

Personally I don't see anything wrong with brute forcing it for now, as long as we can brute force it we might as well.

Getting away from opinion for a while, I wouldn't worry about the slaughter of your innocent little P.S.U. (which really should be a good 400 watts for modern computers) as the card requires external power. To quote [H]ardOCP...

"You will also note that there is a Molex connector on this card to plug in for the extra power that's needed. The power the AGP port supplies just isn't enough to run the card stably. Just like the Radeon 9700 Pro, you must plug in external power to the card."

Damn, I'm just gonna come out and say it (and risk major flames):
I'm disgusted with the overabundance of hype with this launch. That's what this launch is. Of course there's no real substance because there's no shipping product!
And maybe it's not just NVIDIA. A lot of companies hype their products when they launch. Gee, even if the launch is three months away. But what really gets me though is the AMOUNT of pure meaningless crap that is spewing from the websites I've seen.
Tell me how it's going to benefit the consumer, by:

1. Comparing the numbers like the "instructions," "constants," and "registers" that this new chip allows. These kinds of numbers mean nothing to the consumer. If nothing else NVIDIA should be pitching this crap to developers.
2. Posting some really pretty pictures of things supposedly rendered with this card. Let me tell you why this is so rediculous.
I did a little test. This is what you were supposed to get with your Geforce 3 (according to the picture on a HardOCP preview). Guess what, no games even LOOK like that yet, let alone if you had one could you play it on a Geforce 3 at acceptable frame rates! Sigh. Things are just getting worse.
3. Real performance. I really can't believe that Anandtech posted frame rate numbers from Doom 3 that were supplied by NVIDIA. Data from an alpha game supplied by the card's manufacturer?. Yet no tests were shown of any other game, be it current or old. That is just rediculous.

Maybe it's not realistic to do this since the card is not even in production yet. Yet NVIDIA chooses to 'announce' their card anyway, in the same fashion they have done in the past (usually when the product is available). Right. It's a very clever game NVIDIA is playing; announce this new product and attempt to hurt sales of their competitor's product in the hope that the consumer waits for this new, overly-hyped and untested product. We've seen this before with the Geforce 3 and we're seeing it again on a larger scale, and I'm sick of it.

ok, so please flame me up the arse for bitching about the current state of deception that's going on in the industry. Yeah, lots of companies do it (while I think NVIDIA is the worst), yet people just eat this shit up! What's the point of going to different web sites when they're all supplied with the same incessant crap that NVIDIA created? I don't want to hear that it's just "the way things are" because I'm saying that they shouldn't be this way.
Thanks for reading.