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3D Mark 2003 Sparks Controversy
cribb writes "3DMark 2003 is out, sparking an intense debate on how trustworthy its assessment of current graphics cards is, after some harsh words by nVidia and the reply from Futuremark. THG has an analysis of the current situation definately worth reading. The article exposes some problems with the new GeforceFX previously mentioned in a slashdot article on Doom3 and John Carmack. Alas, here seems to be no end to the troubles with the new nVidia flagship." If you've run the benchmark, post your scores here, and we'll all compare.
Now, it's the video card makers slagging the benchmark makers.
Anybody remember the early 90s (93?) when Hercules got itself into hot water by hard-coding a super-fast result for the PC Magazine video benchmark? Whoo hoo, that made for some good press. Got their awards pulled and everything.
Do daemons dream of electric sleep()?
NVidia missed a manufacturing cycle and now it's coming back to haunt them. They really need to drop the FX and concentrate on whatever new architecture is currently being tossed around in R&D.
Originally I was planning to buy the successor to the NV30 for a great experience in Quake III and better framerates in older games. But now it looks like I'll be laying out the dough on whatever ATI brings out early next year.
Benchmarks are generally too isolated to be of much use. They might be okay for getting a rough picture, but a high scoring 3d benchmark might not directly translate into good 3d performance.
Even so-called 'real world' benchmarks that test stuff like file opening and scrolling documents don't really get into the meat of the everyday user experience.
Using benchmarks to decide what computer to buy is like macking on the girl with the big boobs. She might look nice, but she could be horrible in bed. Also she might have crabs.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Personally, I think that a good benchmark is just doing whatever you are going to be doing and timing that.
Are you going to be playing much of the 3D-Mark benchmark ? If the answer is yes, then you should use it, otherwise it's pure masterbation. Their site claims that the purpose of the benchmark is to give you an idea of what a typical DX7-DX9 game will give you in performance. However, the 'games' they use to test it are not games you can actually play. It's basically a graphics demo. Wow.
The only benchmarks even worth considering are the Quake, Unreal, etc. benchmarks that test real games being played. And even those results should be taken with a grain of salt. They are 'real world' results, but you have to take into account many factors to actually derive useful information from them. Such as RAM, CPU, resolution that marks were run at, etc.
If you are smart, then you will buy your graphic card from a place like Fry's that will let you return it if the performance is unsatisfactory. In this day and age where the graphics card costs more then a computer, you had better get your money's worth.
Sometimes people scratch their heads about benchmarks and wonder "how did they come up with that number?" If the benchmark itself was Open Source you'd have at least a partial answer. Not to mention you'd have the eyes of many people looking over the code to make sure it was executing draws in the right and consistent manner.
So why aren't benchmarks open? What do the makers of benchmarks have to hide? Are they under NDAs from the card vendors?
Carmack says:
It seems that the NV30 architecture requires a good deal more optimization to run shader code optimally (read: fast), while R300 deals with standard code much better. This would explain why NVIDIA is so harsh and aggressive in its criticism of the new 3DMark 2003, since the GeForce FX (NV30) seems to have a problem with non-optimized shader code, a trait that its mainstream siblings NV31 and NV34 will obviously share. If word got around - and in this community, it does - this could seriously hurt NVIDIA's sales.
To be fair, in real games this "handicap" will most likely not be nearly as pronounced as in the 3DMark test. After all, NVIDIA is very good at convincing game developers to optimize and adapt their code for their hardware.
So NVidia only runs well with optimized code huh? That's going to be a problem for them I think. It means we won't know how well it works until we get some games to benchmark it with. Sure, we could benchmark it with UT2003 or something; but that doesn't mean much. I don't care about UT2003. My current card runs that fine. I (and other people who buy these cards) care about how they will run the next gen games. We could wait until those games come out, but a lot of people don't have that patience. For those people it might be safer to get the ATI. If you go with NVidia you have to really trust that the games you want are going to be well optimized for it, though as Carmack said, they probably will be. Personally I'm still on the fence about which card I will eventually get.
Aw crap, ninjas!
There's a substantial thread on Ars Technica's forums that contains a ton of benchmark results. What it boils down to is that if you have a decent processor (Athlon XP 1600+ or better) and an NVidia GF4 Ti4600, you'll end up with something like 1500-1700 3DMarks. If you pull the GF4 out and slap in a Radeon 9700 Pro (and get the appropriate drivers installed, of course), your score would shoot up to over 4000 3DMarks.
I've got a Ti4600, and 3DMark 2003 runs like ass. Fortunately, Splinter Cell plays just fine, so I'll ignore the benchmark and get on with actually using the computer.
This is what is scaring me about Nvidia, Espicially since just about everything Nvidia makes is running my PC right now and it would be a cold day in hell before an ATI product touches my PC.
From what I've seen so far, Nvidia is doing the exact same thing that 3dfx Did when the voodoo3 came out, and whats more disturbing is that the're following the 3dfx downward spiral so close that you could praticially mirror the two, a sort of NVfx if you will.
Making Video cards, Pushing their Rendering Format harder than ever, Bashing Benchmarks, claiming that their hardware is limited for a reason, ETC. All of this failed miserably when 3dfx did it, and it's going to fail for Nvidia as well.
It wouldn't suprise me to see a dual GeforceFX board this year, or even a quad version. It's what 3dfx did before they went under.
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