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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)."

7 of 404 comments (clear)

  1. What's the big news? by binaryDigit · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Isn't this SOP for the entire video card industry? Every few years someone gets caught targeting some aspect of performance to the prevailing benchmarks. I guess that's what happens when people wax on about "my video card does 45300 fps in quake and yours only does 45292, your card sucks, my experience is soooo much better". For a while now it's been the ultimate hype driven market wrt hardware.

    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. The reason by S.I.O. · · Score: 5, Funny

    They just hired some ATI engineers.

  3. Re:Hmmmm by drzhivago · · Score: 5, Informative

    Do you remember how a year or so ago ATI released a driver set that reduced image quality in Quake 3 to increase frame rate?

    Here is a link about it in case you forgot or didn't know.

    It just goes to show that both companies play that game, and neither to good results.

  4. Re:Does this even improve your experience? by Hellkitty · · Score: 5, Funny

    You make an excellent point. I am tired of spending way too much money trying to reach that holy grail of gaming. The slight improvement in hardware isn't going to change the fact that I'm only a mediocre gamer. The best gamers are going to kick my ass regardless of what hardware they use. I don't need to spend $400 every six months to be reminded of that.

  5. Re:whatever by Pulzar · · Score: 5, Informative

    Instead of only looking at the pictures, read the whole article before making decisions on whether it's a driver "fuckup" or an intentional optimization.

    The short of it is that nVidia added hard-coded clipping of the scenes for everything that the banchmark doesn't show in its normal run, and which gets exposed as soon as you move the camera away from its regular path.

    It's a step in the direction of recording an mpeg on what the benchmark is supposed to show and then playing it back at 200 fps.

    --
    Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
  6. 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)