Slashdot Mirror
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."
Sounds like the fault of the benchmarking community not ATI. Why should we be annoyed that it runs the top game of the year extra well? Being able to run Quake3 was a major selling point. Should ATI not make quake 3 run faster even though they could? Hell no, that would be stupid. I suppose they probably could have included a sticker that said made with quake in mind or something and maybe they did I dunno.
In any case application specific optimizations are a great tool. They got an extra 18% speed out of the chip with just application specific tweaks. That's a pretty damn significant increase. Ignoring that would be a terrible decision. All graphics drivers should use this and update the drivers every few months as new games come out.