Futuremark Replies to Nvidia's Claims

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.

Comments

The real reason this is important.

[Cannelbrae]

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.

State of nvidia development team

[cmburns69]

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 ...

Re:nVidia vs. ATI

[asdkrht]

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.

Get over it....just look at it how YOU will use it

[rimcrazy]

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.