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More 'Application-Specific' Optimizations in NVidia Drivers
EconolineCrush writes "Futuremark and NVIDIA have been embroiled in a spat over various cheat/optimizations in 3DMark03 for several weeks now. Last week, the soap opera appeared to be over; Futuremark and NVIDIA released a joint statement in which Futuremark clarified that NVIDIA was optimizing its drivers for 3DMark03 rather than cheating. This story, however, appears to be far from over. Tech Report has uncovered a new series of optimizations in NVIDIA's Detonator FX drivers that affect image quality in even Futuremark's latest 3DMark03 build. What's more, if you rename the 3DMark03 executable, the optimizations disappear."
...to profit off of their customers hopes and dreams. This kind of crap is really showing off the sorry state of our modern societies. we're scum. dirty scum.
Machine9dotNet
a) Is this indicative of a high level strategy by NVidia's management, who's marketing department is pressuring them to have higher 3DMark2003 scores than ATI?
OR
b) Has some low level device driver programmer (intern?) looked to get some easy brownie points by "optimising" the drivers for 3dMark2003 in a slightly clunky way?
Either is quite interesting :) I've been a victim/perpetrator of both in the past.
If we could have the Open Source developer community review and improve these drivers we would not encounter any problems with them. The experience and integrity of the Open Source developer community would be vital for the consumer to take Nvidia cards seriously in the market.
Benchmarks would reflect the actual performance of the card instead of skewing the results in order to garner favorable reviews.
Only when we allow Nvidia to see the benefits of Open Source can we free the graphic benchmark software from the clutches of Matrox.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
If renaming the file changes the optimizations, why doesn't anyone (read: not me) take a gander at the detonator drivers and figure out what OTHER games it's tuned to?
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
If nVidia continues to have these bulky video cards which take two PCI slots and make noise like a whale they just might go by the way side just like 3DFX.
nVidia is walking a tight rope and for the first time in six years I'm actually going to consider buying an ATI. Come September 30th there is 90% chance that I'll have an ATI card on my machine.
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One is born into aristocracy, but mediocrity can only be achieved through hard work.
it matters because companies use 3DMark in determining what vid-cards to put in their systems. It matter because there are no other benchmarks besides 3DMark that let you benchmark features that are not yet found on games. That's the point of 3DMark: To test features that are not yet aailable in games. Games are lagging behind when it comes to implementing features. Hell, Doom 3 is targeted at GeForce's feature-set (you know, the ORIGINAL GeForce. After that we have had GeForce 2, GeForce 3, GeForce 4 and GeForce FX)!
Lesbian Nazi Hookers Abducted by UFOs and Forced Into Weight Loss Programs - -all next week on Town Talk.
Forget about Intel vs. AMD, RDRAM vs. DDR. This is the real political intrigue now. Two cheating hardware companies and the benchmark tool company who hasn't got the guts to stand behind the truth of the matter.
Once again, and this can't be stated strongly enough - synthetic benchmarks really don't tell you what you think you're hearing. Indicative? Yes. Conclusive? Absolutely not. Don't listen too deeply to them.
When this much money is at stake, don't expect to hear the truth from any angle associated with these companies. Remember, we're dealing with marketers and lawyers here...
Also when I said controller I meant gamepad. I know that mouse/keyboard is best for FPS and strategy and many types of very good games (not to mention flight-sticks, racing wheels for other types of games), but PC gamepads stink. I wish MS would just sell X-Box-S controllers with a standard USB plug and drivers (I am aware you can do it yourself, btw).
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Dell use 3DMark when the determine what 3D-acceletators
Yes, Dell shouldn't rely on these benchmarks either. Anyone who makes buying decisions based solely on generic benchmarks is a fool.
As to the "Just use games to benchmark!". It's not that easy. 3DMark is meant to test vid-cards on demos that use future technologies
Like what? The graphics card industry is a mature market now. Features aren't changing. We're just seeing more speed. About the only new feature recently has been programmable shaders, and even those can be tested adequately using DX7 style texture stages.
Actual applications will be written to work around potential inefficiencies anyway. If a game performs badly in a 3DMark test because of latency issues, it's quite possible that the actual games will simply use a slightly modified version of the same shader with different instruction order.
And I do think it's disreputable that NV cheat. However, I don't start by assuming they're a reputable company. This is the behavious I expect from them.
Actually the limit is closer to the 70-80 Hz range. Try changing your (CRT) monitor's refresh rate to 60Hz, most people can easily see it flicker at that rate (especially large white areas). However, at 72Hz most people can no longer see the flicker.
I KNOW 125fps is way above the human limit. I tend to disregard any comments people make about being able to tell the difference between frame rates higher than 60. While we are technically able to tell the difference between 60 and 70, it's too damn hard to during a game in which things are changing too quickly.
I mean, in this age were we are supposed to tweak the bejesus out of everything (just look at all the people with computers in refridgerators :) ), why not simply let the users choose themselfs?
;)
Just add a new page in the driver settings where you can add an exe-file and then allow the user to activate the different "tweaks/optimizations". It would be more honest and people who want more speed than looks would be happy as a clam.
"But won't the user be confused by all the options?" I hear you ask. Maybe, but have you looked at the BIOS setup lately? Now, the wrong settings here can potentially blow the socks of your precious processor, but the wrong tweak setting will only make DOOM XII look ugly.
Anyway, thats my five cents on this issue. Enough with this and onwards to new drivers and more piethrowing
Scared to release a dvd only game? How about smart not to. Believe it or not, not everyone has a dvd drive. And what the hell do you care what a game comes on if its the same game? Is your life so important that you can't swap the discs 4 times so you can play enter the matrix?
I'm not trolling or anything I'm just tired of people complaining about the game industry not releasing on dvds, its always the same people who also complain about them pushing newer hardware.
[Just Shut Up and Do What I say]
So, a truthful review would say "It does not really matter which card you buy at this time, because most games do not take advantage of the high-end features. By the time that games actually utilize the advanced capabilities of this generation of graphics cards, there will be a new generation, with a new set of (unused) features."
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
Actually, that is very interesting. Any bets you've stunbled onto an entirely different cheat?
Let's say Microsoft wanted Outlook to have some special capabilities in the operating system. So the OS recognizes it and gives it special treatment. Another app comes along with the same name and triggers the "special treatment" but can't handle it. Ka-Boom.
This also brings up the possibility of really screwing with these drivers. Go get another game program (QUAKE.EXE or whatever) and rename it to the name of the benchmark. What does the driver do to it?
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Part of this is distribution media keeping pace with fixed storage media. Back in 1985, fixed disks were 5-10MB, and distribution media (5.25" floppies) were 360K. You could fill up your 10 MB disk with 28 floppies.
Today, your 120GB disk would require over 170 CDs (at 700MB each) to fill up (leaving compression aside, this is just a back-of-the-envelope estimate). By contrast, a 4GB DVD brings the ratio to 30 disks. Roughly comparable to the numbers 18 years ago. Of course, we are moving on to larger disks; 250GB is now the top end.
Due to the antics of copyright holders and media/drive maker "consortiums", the rate of expansion of distribution media has fallen behind that of fixed storage media. The DVD has still not become the accepted distribution format, despite the fact that DVD drives are nearly as cheap as CD drives, and DVD writers are becoming affordable.
It's time for the computer and software manufacturers to get their act together and move to the next logical step for distribution.
Floating face-down in a river of regret...and thoughts of you...
> Whatever happened to Origin?
http://www.origin.ea.com/
Technically, they're still around. However, after being purchased by EA (IIRC), they lost (EA fired) the majority of their creative and technical talent. The result? Origin exists only in the capacity of endless UO expansions.
> Point is, if you release a good enough game, people will upgrade their PCs to get it.
This is no different on the PC than it is for anything else. Houses, cars, console systems, PC, guns, ceiling fans... when one doesn't cut it anymore (defined by what action you wish the object to complete), you repair/upgrade/replace it.
PCs in particular have an interesting co-dependant relationship between software and hardware. More demanding software products yield better hardware (ie, benchmarks), while more powerful hardware allows "better" (faster, prettier) software.
> Maybe we'll see Doom3 on DVD? It's a thought.
Why? What's the advantage of going DVD over CD for the majority of games released? Unless we're talking Baldur's Gate-style 6 CD sets, what's the incentive to switch?
There are CD cases that contain two CDs, for the ones that still come in jewel cases. Neverwinter Nights, which came on three CDs, had the disks in a CD envelope instead of a case.
And since hard drives are so large, the only reason most games need a CD in the drive is to make sure you've still got 'em.
Think of it this way: what incentives do publishers have to release DVDs instead of CDs?
-lw
Mods: Disagreeing with me != my post Offtopic / Flamebait.
World without hate or war, invaded. Tragic?
Last week when this topic was on slashdot somebody posted that its possible to run these benchmarks rendering them through a software driver that conforms 100% to the DX9 spec. Slow as hell but you end up with EXACTLY what you should get. Maybe the 3DMark authors could render all this stuff in software so they'll know exactly what SHOULD be rendered by a video card and then have a new section in their benchmarks that compares what should have been rendered to what actually was. So, you run the benchmark and you end up with something like this: Nvidia FX: frames per second: 187, accuracy of rendered image: 62% ATI Radeon: frames per second: 177, accuracy of rendered image: 94%
Ok, most people don't understand that there is no one correct method for everything. NVIDIA has it's own rendering path for AF. They want 3dmark to take advantage of their optimization, so they detect when 3dmark is run and force it to take the faster rendering path. The net result is an undetectable quality difference (i can't tell the difference at all) -- and not necessarily quality degredation...just difference. It's not like when ATI made it's hacks so that quake 3 was visually horrible on ati cards. Honestly, all this hoopla is just that. 3dmark's use of generic rendering paths does not properly benchmark the abilities of the vid cards that have optimized paths. Obviously, game developers will take advantage of nvidia's rendering path for AF on nvidia cards and ati's rendering path on ati cards and default to the generic path for everything else. 3dmark is not a good method of benchmarking video cards. your favorite game is the best benchmark. obviously, there need to be some changes made (at 3dmark, nvidia, and ati) to address using vendor specific optimizations. and sensationalist journalists like this need to leave their biases out of their reports (or at least think critically about what they're reporting and realize that the larger issue is the innapropriateness of 3dmark as a proper benchmarking utility).