The Empire Strikes Back

[John Reynolds]

http://www.beyond3d.com/articles/3dmark03/340/

This topic should light the 3D flame wars anew. Here's a PR kicker you gotta' love:


At one we asked Derek [NV PR] how this sat with the optimisations guidelines that were given to press by NVIDIA, specifically the guideline that suggests "An optimization must accelerate more than just a benchmark" To which Derek's reply was "But 3DMark03 is only a benchmark" -- it was suggested that this particular guideline should read "An optimization must accelerate more than just a benchmark unless the application is just a benchmark"!

[quatoria]

Wow. So long as that remains nvidia policy, any nvidia benchmark is utterly worthless.

[John Reynolds]

Pretty much. The strange thing is watching people attack 3DMark because it has to be patched thanks to all these shenanigans, yet how many developers patch their game once it's published to prevent its benchmark/timedemo code from being hacked on?

[Brad Grenz]

Yeah, I think Future Mark gets more shit than they deserve when it's so clear that nVidia has been doing super-uncool things, and never stops lying about it. Their story for this patch is that the developers have gone out of their way to defeat their jit shader optimizer thingy. Call me skeptical. It sounds like the new nVidia optimization policy never made it from the marketing department to the driver engineers...