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Futuremark And Gainward Tangle Over Benchmarks
An anonymous reader writes "The optimization troubles in GPU land aren't over yet. Yesterday Futuremark released a new anti-optimization patch for 3DMark03. Gainward (who sell graphics cards using NVIDIA hardware) today made a comment that Futuremark had disabled certain features in their ForceWare 52.16 drivers, thus resulting in huge performance drops. A few hours ago Futuremark made an official statement about this : 'The accusation is totally wrong because what it suggests is not even feasible technically. 3DMark03 does not talk to graphics driver, it talks to the DirectX API, which then talks to the driver. Thus, it is impossible for the application to disable GPU compiler...'"
... make me realize how stupid I've been for so long. I used to buy thousands of dollars of computer equipment to be able to play the latest games until a friend of mine asked me, "Why don't you spend $200 and get a console?" You know what, there is no good reason not to. I'm a moron.
...And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me." - Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984)
a) is your video card good enough to do the things you do.
b) the price/performance ratio, unless you have tons of money.
And how, preciselly, are we supposed to determine those price/performance ratios if our benchmarking suites are lying to us?
Reviews featuring benchmarks taken from real games, preferably the specific games you intend to play.
Who gives a fig if drivers are 'creatively optimised' for real games, so long as the quality doesn't suffer?
Benchmark apps are for e-wang waving.
Opportunity knocks. Karma hunts you down.