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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.
As long as there are benchmarks, companies will write drivers to get the best score. I would say about 95% of consumers purchase (buying high end cards) based on benchmark scores. Of course you would write a driver that gives the best score to increase your sales. nVidia is just very good, and way better than ATI, at writing drivers that exploit many of the benchmarks now in use.
Is it a bad thing? Not from nVidia's view and ATI is jealous that their code monkeys are falling behind (or understaffed).
Does it make the benchmark invalid? Yes. But it does not matter since 3DMARK has become a "standard." Both card companies will try to exploit the benchies to get the best score and take the "performance crown" and the sales that come with it.
"What!? Two giant corporations actually doing something MS-like to make themselves more appealing?!"
I know! Let's buy a bunch of video cards that both ATI and NVidia make that they take a loss on, then try to circumvent their protection mechanisms so we can install Linux on them. Won't it piss them off that they lost money AND they got Linux installed on it instead of using it as a graphics processor!
"Derp de derp."
Open source benchmarks will only give you the opportunity to fiddle with the benchmark to unearth hidden cheats but same thing can also be used tweak the benchmark one way to favor one hardware over another. IOW, it will be even harder to catch cheating/biased reviewers; not a very good idea.
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
If the government had a clue ,they would sue or FORCE all the major software and hardware companies to open up their source code for compatibility with other Operating systems and other software.
Some of you may think thats impossible but it could be done. Think about it ! All the hardware makers release drivers for ONE damn company - Microsoft. It's not right.
Benchmarks are pretty much only for fanboys who want to dicksize their systems. Ever looked at a gaming message board? Everyone has their 3dmark score in their sig. Other than that, most hardware review sites only mention 3dmark in passing, instead relying on more real world tests (read: games) than some stupid artificial benchmark. Hell even these fanboys will tell you that 3dmark means nothing. And believe me, the OEMs know what they're doing. Most OEMs use NVidia chips for business reasons (NVidia does not make their own cards like ATI does) not because they want to be part of some holy war. The video card market is about as interesting as the SCSI card market right now though. It's gotten to the point where it's just like "It's fast. Who cares what else."