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FutureMark Confirms nVidia's Benchmark Cheating

Posted by michael on from the red-handed dept.

jlouderb writes "As first reported by ExtremeTech, Futuremark has confirmed that nVidia is cheating on its 3DMark2003 benchmark through eight driver optimizations. The 3D graphics performance war just keeps getting more and more interesting!" See our previous story.

5 of 404 comments (clear)

  1. This is why.. by craigtay · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You don't base your findings on one benchmark. Whenever I go to a site like tomshardware.com they have several different ways to benchmark. Each card has its own strengths, and if a card has cheated it will show up like that.

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  2. Re:This is why artificial benchmarks don't matter by mskfisher · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Wrong - as they point out in the article, these "optimizations" are usually reductions in quality. They don't just improve performance.

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  3. History repeats itself a thousand times over... by voxel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    This has been done for many years, even the last decade. A good friend of mine works and has worked for almost every major video card company in the buisness for the last decade. What is his job? Make sure THEIR video card gets the best scores on the latest and greatest video cards.

    I am sorry to tell you all, but just because Nvidia was CAUGHT this time, doesn't mean they haven't been "cheating" (by optimizing for a specific benchmark) for the last 6 years.

    I would bet every driver release contains code to help out benchmarks and even specific games. Why do you think Nvidia just said with there latest driver release " *Up to 30% faster frame rates ( *With Unreal Tournament 2002)".

    Its just once in a great while someone notices a performance jump TOO big, or just wants some news worthy-ness and decides to put out a nice PDF file.

    - Jeff

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    Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
  4. Wasted Code by JeffRC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Just think about this the next time you do a 5MB driver download. How much of that code is specifically for detecting and defeating benchmarks? How much of the cheats are part of the instability problems in your system?

  5. Re:lies and statistics. by Surak · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The problem with 'real world testing' when it comes to video cards aimed at the gamers market is basically the difference between a few lousy FPS between the two top-of-the-line cards (and each have similar features, performance-wise) will be virtually indistinguishable in most cases.

    I think people shouldn't get all macho when it comes to this stuff. Honestly, it's like the difference between a 350 hp engine and a 351 hp engine. It doesn't amount to a hill of beans worth of difference except on paper.

    Get over it people.

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