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Intel Caught Cheating In 3DMark Benchmark
EconolineCrush writes "3DMark Vantage developer Futuremark has clear guidelines for what sort of driver optimizations are permitted with its graphics benchmark. Intel's current Windows 7 drivers appear to be in direct violation, offloading the graphics workload onto the CPU to artificially inflate scores for the company's integrated graphics chipsets. The Tech Report lays out the evidence, along with Intel's response, and illustrates that 3DMark scores don't necessarily track with game performance, anyway."
Thanks for telling all of us that the best measure of hardware's performance ingame is... to benchmark it with a game.
A bullet may have your name on it but splash damage is addressed "To whom it may concern."
It seems entirely reasonable to me for them to optimize the driver to run particular programs faster if at all possible.
Perhaps, but you definitely don't do it for the benchmark. The article quotes the 3DMark Vantage guidelines which are perfectly clear.
With the exception of configuring the correct rendering mode on multi-GPU systems, it is prohibited for the driver to detect the launch of 3DMark Vantage executable and to alter, replace or override any quality parameters or parts of the benchmark workload based on the detection. Optimizations in the driver that utilize empirical data of 3DMark Vantage workloads are prohibited.
So yes, SLI and Crossfire are a different case.
Effectively dividing tasks among CPUs is not the issue here. They want to benchmark the GPU and they wanna make sure you don't enable optimizations that are targeted specifically for the benchmark which Intel was doing shamelessly.
Well, if the GPU becomes saturated, I could imagine the rest of the load spilling over to the CPU (one or many cores). Obviously the GPU is more efficient at video tasks, but if the video task is priority for the user, why not offload to the CPU as well? Makes sense to me.
If you do that for a benchmark app then you are not really testing (just) the performance of the graphics hardware, so turning on that optimization without disclosing it is probably not really a fair comparison of the hardware. To make it 'fair' you really need to make the benchmark app to be aware of the feature and be able to turn it on or off under software control, or at least know if it is enabled or not. I wonder if similar optimisations could be made to any 3D video driver...
In the real world, if the user wants high graphics performance and there are CPU cores doing nothing then like you said, offloading to them makes perfect sense.
I'm not defending Intel at all, but...
ATI's done it: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/display/20030526040035.html
NVIDIA's done it: http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1048824/nvidia-cheats-3dmark-177
They've probably done it several times in the past with other benchmarking software as well.
They're all dishonest. Don't trust anyone!
That's not interesting. How do you plan to connect a non-Intel CPU to an Intel chipset with integrated graphics?
More data, damnit!