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...'"

Comments

just returned a gainward 5200 128

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i went to a computer show this weekend and i picked up a gainward 5200 128. installed the latest nvidia drivers. installed 3d mark 2001 se (i only play dx8.1 games) so i wanted to test the results. i seriously got a score of 3100. i returned the card and bought an ati 9100 128 pro instead and scored a 7100.

since i mostly play americas army, i checked my FPS with the 5200 and was scoring around 10 fps on the map SFcsar. i thought AA implemented a new bullet-time feature!

i think my card may have been screwed up but i didnt feel like troubleshooting it extensively.