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NVidia Accused of Inflating Benchmarks
Junky191 writes "With the NVidia GeForce FX 5900 recently released, this new high-end card seems to beat out ATI's 9800 pro, yet things are not as they appear. NVidia seems to be cheating on their drivers, inflating benchmark scores by cutting corners and causing scenes to be rendered improperly. Check out the ExtremeTech test results (especially their screenshots of garbled frames)."
To bad Nvidia has to resort to these things to keep selling there cards.. The used to be great.. but now i have my doubts..
Read this article NVIDIA's Back with NV35 - GeForceFX 5900 Ultra
3Dmark03 may be inflated but what counts is real world game benching. And FX 5900 wins over ATI in all but Comanche 4.
Interesting ehh?
"Engineers do the work of man, Physicists do the work of God"
I know, I thought this was common practice across the board in the video card industry. NVidia has always had the shadiest marketing (remember what the 256 stood for in the GeForce 256?) so I don't really think anyone would be surprised by this.
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nVidia has been one of the more customer friendly video card makers...ever. They have full support for all platforms from Windows to Macs to Linux, this makes them, to me, one of the best companies around.
So now they are falling into the power trap of "we need to be better and faster then the others" which is only going to have them end up like 3DFX in the end. Cutting corners is NOT the way to gain consumer support.
As I look at it, it doesn't matter if your the fastest or not...it's the wide variety of platform support that has made them the best. ATi does make better hardware but their software (drivers) are terrible and not very well supported. If ATi would get the support that nVidia has been giving for the last few years, I would start using ATi hands down...It's the platform support that I require, not speed.
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
I recall about 10 years ago that one of the video adaptor manufacturers optimised their Windows 3.1 acclerated video drivers to give the best performance possible with the benchmark program Ziff-Davis used for their reviews.
One test involved writing a text string in a particular font continuously to the screen in. This text string was encoded directly in the driver for speed. Similarly one of the polygon drawing routines was optimised for the particular polygons used in this benchmark.
Posting anonymously because I used to work for a graphics card company.
I've seen a video card driver where about half the performance-related source code was put in specifically for benchmarks (WinBench, Quake3, and some CAD-related benchmarks), and the code was ONLY used when the user is running said benchmark. This is one of the MAJOR consumer cards, people.
So many programming hours put into marketing's request to optimize the drivers for a particular benchmark. It makes me sick to think that we could have been improving the driver's OVERALL performance and add more features! One of the reasons I left......
I bought the first 64MB DDR Radeon right after it came out. I held on to the card for months waiting for ATI to release a driver, didn't happen. I heard of people having sucess getting 3D acceleration to work, but I could never duplicate that success.
Finally after months of waiting I traded my Radeon to my roommate and got a GeForce 2 Pro with 64MB of DDR. Runs beutifully on Linux, I even play UT2K3 with it on an Athlon 850. Finally after having the GeForce2 for about four months I happen across a site that tells me how to make 3D acceleration work for the Radeon. To late now, I'm happy with my GeForce, and UT2K3 seems to only really want to work with nVidia anyways.
I don't think drivers are the best way to defend ATI considering they tend to shrug off other OS's and nVidia has committed themselves to supporting Alternate OS's.
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Since upon reading the article it even states that nVidia don't have access to the version of 3dmark2003 (not on the beta team) so they can have errors between the drivers and the code for 3dmark and not know. This is the kind of thing that can happen, and will take a driver update to fix, but does not necessarily mean they are doing anything wrong.
As someone who has always been impressed by nVidia's driver updates and the benefits they can give each time, I am going to wait to see if it really is something bad they are doing deliberately before changing my opinion of them.
There is, at the moment, no real evidence in anyones favour.
Because these rendering errors only occur when you go off the timedemo camera track. If you were on the normal track (like you would be if you were just running the standard demo) you would not notice it. Go off the track and the card ceases to render properly. It's an optimization that is too specific and too coincidental for the excuse "driver bug" to work. It's not the first time nvidia has been seen to 'optimize' for 3dmark either (there was a driver set, a 42.xx or 43.xx, can't remember, where it didn't even render things like explosions and smoke in game test 1 for 3DM03)
Why is it that people are assessing the performance of cards based on running the same narrow set of benchmarks each time? Of _course_ if you do that then performance optimization will be narrowly focused towards those benchmarks. Not just on the level of blatant cheating (recording a particular hardcoded text string or clipping plane) but more subtle things like only optimizing one particular code path because that's the only one the benchmark exercises.
More importantly why is any benchmark rendering the exact same scene each time? Nobody would test an FPU based on how many times per second it could take the square root of seven. You need to generate thousands, millions of different scenes and render them all. Optionally, the benchmark could generate the scenes at random, saving the random seed so the results are reproducible and results can be compared.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
If Nvidia GPL their drivers, no other company can directly incorporate code from them without also releasing their drivers under the GPL. So, NVidia found out just as much as ATI do.
GPLing the drivers would give NVidia:
1) Thousands of developers willing to submit detailed bug reports, port drivers, improve performance on 'alternative' operating systems etc.
2) Protection from these kind of cheating accusations
3) Better relationship with game developers - optimising for an NVidia card when you've got details of exactly how the drivers work is going to be much easier than for a competitor card.
4) A huge popularity boost amongst the geek community, who spend a lot on hardware every year.
NVidia is, first and foremost, a hardware company. In the same way that Sun, IBM etc. contribute to open-source projects in order to make their hardware or other services more appealing, NVidia stand to gain a lot too.
And as for rogue drivers? I suppose you're worried about rogue versions of the Linux kernel destroying your processor?
5) Liability. Though it doesn't Make Sense (tm), if someone downloaded an "optimized driver" from superoptimizedrivers.com that in turn melted their chip or corrupted their vid card RAM in some way there would be repurcussions.
Realize, in a society in which people sue others over dogs barking too loud, NVidia would definitely hear from a very small but very vocal group about it.
6) Nivida's Programmers Don't Want This. Why? Let's say they GPL'd just the Linux reference driver. And in less than two weeks, a new optimized version came out that was TWICE as fast as the one before. This makes the programmers looks foolish. I know this is pure ego, but it is a concern I'm sure, for a programmer w/ a wife and kids.
I know this all sounds goofy, and trivial. But politics and Common Sense do not mesh. Again, I think your intentions are great and in a perfect world there would be thousands working on making the best, most optimized driver out there.
But if such a community were to exist (and you know it would), why bother paying a league of great programmers and not just send out a few test boards to those most active in that new community, more than willing to do work for Free (as in beer?)
Just something to think about.
Companies always tweak their code, insist on tests optimized for their hardware, etc. in order to get an edge up on benchmarks. This is probably especially true in cases where the competition is so neck-and-neck, as it seems to be with the video card industry. It seems that these companies will do anything to show they can get even two or three more FPS than the competition. It is hard to treat any benchmark seriously because of this.
At the same time, I'm debating what my next video card should be. Even though ATI's hardware might be slightly better this round, the differences will probably be negligable to all but the most extreme gamers. At the same time NVidia has proven to me that they have a history of writing good drivers, and they still provide significantly better support to the Linux community than ATI does.
For this reason I'm still siding with the GeForce family of video cards.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Companies have long adopted the "open-source" fundamental philosophy even before Linux and what I call the modern open source movement caught on. Often, a company would have a nice product - license the code to a sub-company (who would modify/repackage/etc the original product). The license agreement stipulated that all modifications would 1) have to be reviewed by the company without restriction from the sub-company 2) the modifications would have to be approved by the company.
Take for instance the relationship between Microsoft and IBM during the OS/2 era. The two companies working on the same code base produced OS/2 and, eventually, the NT kernel.
Or, more recently - the brilliant strategy of Netscape Communications Corporation - the birth of the Mozilla project. To the open source community - take our browser, modify it like hell, make it a better project. You have, of course, Mozilla as the browser - but Netscape (Navigator) still exists (as a repackaged, "enhanced" Mozilla).
nVidia's source code release would have two major impacts as far as their performance goes.
1) ATI (et al.) would find the actual software-based enhancements they could also incorporate into their own driver to improve their product.
2) nVidia could capture the many brilliant software developers that happen to be a part of the whole nVidia "cult" - this could lead to significant advancements to their driver quality (and overall product quality).
My guess is that the lid is kept so tightly shut on nVidia's drivers because they can keep their chips relatively simple through their complex software driver. ATI, perhaps, has the technical edge in the hardware arena, but does not have the finesse for software enhancing drivers like nVidia does.
Ayup