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NVidia Accused of Inflating Benchmarks

Posted by michael on from the pointing-fingers dept.

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)."

2 of 404 comments (clear)

  1. Re:What's the big news? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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......

  2. Re:whatever by GarfBond · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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)