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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.
Definitely, it's been a downer today. Come on!
Apple's InkWell: Not Just OCR!
Recently, Microsoft announced "Digital Ink," a handwriting-recognition technology that many compare to Apple's InkWell, both respectively set to debut in the next major revisions of Windows and Mac OS X. As whenever similar technologies pop up at Microsoft, Apple Mac zealots ask a few questions: Was Microsoft's Digital Ink developed in-house at Microsoft? Was it bought from a third-party? Grabbed from a sub-licensor?
The answer is that Digital Ink came directly from Apple. But the story behind how Microsoft was able to so simply buy InkWell and rename it for use in Windows is a tale of moral depravity and sordid carnal desperation that few are privy to-- until today! Read on to discover how Microsoft came to own yet another key Apple technology in the most sordid of political maneuverings.
It all began in the late 1970s. Steve Jobs, after a night of smoking marijuana and tripping on "acid" (lysergic acid diethylamide), conceived of a way to interact with computers using only the mind. Well-known at Stanford for his telekinetic abilities, such as making entire fields of grass sway with but a thought, Steve wanted to move the "mouse" and "menu" (bizarre, alien concepts to anyone outside of his clique of 2600 hackers and EE alcoholics) with nothing but the power of his mind. Of course his compatriots, peaceful, bearded Steve Wozniak and the illegally immigrated Avie Tevanian, dismissed the idea as yet another episode of harmless drug-induced rambling.
In 2002, 26 years after his messianic user interface vision, Steve Jobs was hard at work in the deepest part of Apple's labs, personally overseeing secret user interface experimentation. It turns out that Steve had never forgotten about his psychedelic user-interface dream and was tirelessly attempting to realize it 30 miles beneath Cupertino, CA. Down here, in his "dungeon," the attempts to connect silicon to carbon were in full force and without regard to their subjects.
Some men had industrial-grade alligator clamps attached to their nipples and testicles which were randomly jolted with millions of volts of electricity in order to stimulate their brains. Other men had deadly mixtures of cocaine and heroin ("eight-balls") injected into their penises while being forced to watch gay porn. Another group endured horrible procedures in which their own arms, legs, and scrotums were replaced with those of gorillas, chimpanzees, and orangutans. One smaller group were forced to smoke opium eight hours a day alternately being whipped and beaten until they managed to move the cursor a pixel or two with just their poppy-addled minds. The most successes, however, had come from Steve's own bizarre device dubbed "handJobs."
handJobs was a series of wires and electro-sensitive pads placed on the fingertips that allowed one to manipulate elements of the Mac OS GUI with simple motions. Steve Jobs, being telekinetic from years of tripping acid, wielded it more powerfully than anyone else in his R&D dungeon. In fact, so powerful was his mind that he like to hook the wires and pads up to his own penis and controlled his Power Mac by means of pelvic thrusts and lude gyrations of his hairy penis and scrotum.
Bill Gates, on a visit to the Apple Campus, accidentally stumbled onto handJobs in a moment that would change UI in computing forever. Feeling that he simply owned the Apple Campus as he did the rest of the world, Mr. Gates walked into Steve Jobs's private office without knocking. Steve was in the middle of "making love" to thin air, pants in a puddle at his ankles, hands on hips, thrusting his engorged member at the monitor! He had decided to take his latest revision of the device to his office to test out when Mr. Gates had walked in on him! Gates knew what he liked and liked what he saw, and began immediately bargaining with Jobs.
By the end of the day, Jobs had created a new technology agreement with Gates. Apple would begin partnering with Microsoft on alternative input techno
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.
But it's a troll paradise, more opportunities for first posts, and less "interesting and insightful" comments to vie for attention.
"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."