Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Futuremark Replies to Nvidia's Claims

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the what-exactly-are-kid-gloves dept.

Nathan writes "Tero Sarkkinen, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Futuremark, has commented on the claims by Nvidia that 3DMark2003 intentionally puts the GeforceFX in bad light, after Nvidia had declined becoming a member of Futuremark's beta program. This issue looks like it will get worse before it gets better." ATI also seems to be guilty of tweaking their drivers to recognize 3DMark.

5 of 317 comments (clear)

  1. The real reason this is important. by Cannelbrae · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Its about the OEMs as much or more than the consumer market. They watch the benchmarks closely -- and make decisions based on results.

    This is where the money really is, and what is worth fighting for.

  2. State of nvidia development team by cmburns69 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Back when nvidia aquired 3dfx, they began to merge their development teams. The fx is the first card by nvidia to be developed by engineers from both the nvidia and 3dfx groups.

    Of course it will work better when you do it their way; It was 3dfx's strength in the beginning, and its downfall in the end.

    But I believe that their current development team has yet to hit its stride, and future offerings will see the trophy going back to nvidia... ... But who knows! I'm no fortune teller ...

    --
    Online Starcraft RPG? At
    Dietary fiber is like asynchronous IO-- Non-blocking!
  3. Re:nVidia vs. ATI by asdkrht · · Score: 5, Interesting

    From what I've heard, Nvidia totally replaced the shader program with ones that they wrote. All ATI did was re order some of the instructions in the shaders to "optimize" them. The optmized and the original shader programs were functionally evquivalent. Sort of what happens when a complier optimizes code. The same can't be said for what Nvidia did.

  4. Get over it....just look at it how YOU will use it by rimcrazy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've worked in the PC industry more years than I care to think about. All graphic card vendors tweak their drivers and bios to make their cards look better. If people didn't put so much emphisis on benchmarks for buying decisions then there would not be much reason to tweak things but the reality of the world is they do.

    On a side note, me and my team many, many years ago designed, what was at the time, one of the fastest chip sets for the blinding new 12 Mhz 386 PC. We had discovered that the Norton SI program that everyone was using to benchmark PC's based most of it's performance on a small 64 Byte (yes, that is not a typo 64 BYTE) loop. We had considered putting a 64 byte cache in our memory controller chip but our ethos won at the end of the day as cleary what we would have done would have been discovered and the benchmark would have been rewritten. Had we done it however, for our 15 mins of fame our benchmarks would have been something crazy like 10x or 100x better than anything out there.

    --
    "TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
  5. Does it -REALLY- matter? by WndrBr3d · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I mean, seriously now folks. I think benchmarking these days is nothing compared to what it used to mean. When the Voodoo3's rolled out to tackle the TNT2's, there was a considerable gap between the two. When nVidia introduced the GeForce GPU, the whole game world was changed and the 3dMark score of a GeForce box was 3x that of a non.

    I think benchmarking these days is almost trivial. The scoring difference between a 9800 Pro and a 5900 Ultra, in the end, will only mean about a 15fps difference in your gaming experience. Honestly now, does playing UT2003 at 60fps vs. 45fps really pump your nuts? if so, then you can go ahead and moderate this as flamebait.

    And as far as 'optomizing code' for benchmarks, it's industry wide. Intel releases custom compilers just so programs will run faster on P4 chips! Is that cheating? Not really. The programs still run the same, just better on the hardware they chose. Same with nVidia in this situation, the picture still LOOKED the same (unless you enabled the free viewing). So who cares what happens in the background?

    My point is, people need to make decisions on their own when it comes to purchasing hardware. It all boils down to personal choice. Some people are hardcore ATI fans no matter what the benchmarks say, others are nVidia fans until the bitter end.

    Personally, I choose nVidia because of hardware compatibility issues in the past with several chipsets i used to have, now it's just habitual. People who are on the fence and really don't have their feet in the water when it comes to hardware might be sold by the gold PCB.

    In the end, well, it boils down to this. You know what they say about opinions ;-)