Nvidia already cheating to make 6800 look good.....

[Overlag]

Translated here

Instead of as before about 23 pictures per second (1,600 x of 1,200 pixels, 32 bits, 4xAA and 8xAF) our GeForce reached 6800 Ultra of extremes edition of suddenly 40.3 pictures per second.

If one however renames the file "FarCry.EXE" for example in "FartCry.EXE" over, the result of the bench mark in the dissolutions of 1.024 x 768, 1,280 x 1,024 and 1,600 x of 1,200 pixels worsens around in each case 10 pictures per second (!).

[Emanon]

Wow, catch me once shame on you, catch me twice shame on ME.


I'll wait to see a few more reports, but if this is true im no longer an Nvidia fan.

[xliipapa6]

Geez, Talk about shoddy workmanship. the sad thing is, If both companies are guilty, then what choices do we have!? they are truly the two only companies that run the videocard market.

[TheFeniX]

Originally Posted by xliipapa6

Geez, Talk about shoddy workmanship. the sad thing is, If both companies are guilty, then what choices do we have!? they are truly the two only companies that run the videocard market.

Every new movie that comes out is "#1 at the box office" or "#1 movie in <insert country here>"
Every truck/car that comes out is "#1 in it's class" or "The best selling truck/car in <insert country here>."

Ask a Microsoft Salesman how secure Windows is. Hell, ask any salesman how secure/great/fast/reliable their product is.

Lying about/distorting facts is not an anamoly is business, it's the standard.

[Wintermute]

Originally Posted by TheFeniX

Every new movie that comes out is "#1 at the box office" or "#1 movie in <insert country here>"
Every truck/car that comes out is "#1 in it's class" or "The best selling truck/car in <insert country here>."

Ask a Microsoft Salesman how secure Windows is. Hell, ask any salesman how secure/great/fast/reliable their product is.

Lying about/distorting facts is not an anamoly is business, it's the standard.

Its not that we are told every product is number 1 when it in fact isn't, it's that if you look hard enough, every product is the best in some way depending on how you define the competition.

Your car may not be the fastest in the world, but it may be the fastest for under £10k, or it may have won best car from Top Gear, whereas another car won best car from What Car? and another sold the most.

Computer geeks get way too into benchmarks. So NVidia is 10fps faster. It doesn't matter. Don't believe the hype, whether its about a car or a graphics card.

[IceCold]

I've seen a hint of bias at Tom's before. ATI would score higher in benchmarks, but nVidia would get a higher overall rating, etc... But the benchmarks are usually what I look at, and I ignore the analysis since it's often poorly written at tech sites.

Another place I like to read about current PC tech is at www.anandtech.com Fantastic site and seems pretty darn objective as well...

[Emanon]

I find the www.guru3d.com give great reviews of all products. He usually lists all of the products cons and pros at the end and there are always some in each section.

[xliipapa6]

Well, We were told the Nvidia 5900 series cards using the NV30 GPU architecture was to be the hit, But in fact we found out through numerous tests, that the deep pipelines of the NV30 were too deep thereby making it a slow GPU for pixel shader technology.

Now the 6800 architecture or NV40 will sport double pipelines to help throughput and hopefully remedying the problem..we will see..

Or I might go with an ATI board and hope for the lesser of two evils.

[Widowmaker]

I'll keep my Nvidia FX Asylum 4600 256megs I see no need to upgrade right now. Plus the card works flawlessly and since I only paid $150 for it why bitch.....

[Overlag]

Post cleaned... lets keep it that way so dave can keep his hands off the nuke thread button

[flux]

Why is this cheating? So they made their card work better for a game, isn't that what you would want? They have been doing it with id games ever since they made a name for themselves. It has never been any kind of a secret. Each game packs their data differently. I don't fault anyone for peering into the data and trying to make their hardware faster for specific games. Makes my playing experience that much better.

Game companies do it from the other end. They have a favorite set of API's that they know how to really tweak, so they use those. Most of the time that means their code runs really slick on one brand of card and not the other. Valve and id are perfect examples of this. Carmack loves OpenGL and nvidia, Gabe loves DirectX and ATI. Do you blame them for picking a favorite? Yeah it sucks, but they are more effective when they specialize.

I'm not bashing anyone here, I'm just curious why people get so upset when they find out nvidia made their card faster for game XXX. It doesn't mean their cards sucks for all other games. Maybe that partiruclar games data was packed specifically to take advantage of OpenGL extensions that they didn't support fully.

I will tell you I have a bias towards nvidia, but I would not hold it against ATI if they tweaked their drivers for a specific game. It's what you have to do sometimes.

[=Sarc=]

I think it's the fact that it must look at the filename to use the enhancements. Why does it run faster when the file is called FarCry.exe and slower when named FartCry.exe?

[Overlag]

Originally Posted by flux

Why is this cheating? So they made their card work better for a game, isn't that what you would want? They have been doing it with id games ever since they made a name for themselves. It has never been any kind of a secret. Each game packs their data differently. I don't fault anyone for peering into the data and trying to make their hardware faster for specific games. Makes my playing experience that much better.

Game companies do it from the other end. They have a favorite set of API's that they know how to really tweak, so they use those. Most of the time that means their code runs really slick on one brand of card and not the other. Valve and id are perfect examples of this. Carmack loves OpenGL and nvidia, Gabe loves DirectX and ATI. Do you blame them for picking a favorite? Yeah it sucks, but they are more effective when they specialize.

I'm not bashing anyone here, I'm just curious why people get so upset when they find out nvidia made their card faster for game XXX. It doesn't mean their cards sucks for all other games. Maybe that partiruclar games data was packed specifically to take advantage of OpenGL extensions that they didn't support fully.

I will tell you I have a bias towards nvidia, but I would not hold it against ATI if they tweaked their drivers for a specific game. It's what you have to do sometimes.

because if you WANT it to be high quality, with FSAAx4 on and lets say AFx8 you dont expect them to shut off FSAAx4 or AFx8. But they go one step further by removing shaddows, and fog as well. I want the game to look how I set it up to be (and how its supposed to look). And Farcry isnt OpenGL, its D3d

You are not bias towards nvidia, but dont know the full details. Nvidia have been doing this crap since they lost the performance lead, they been cutting corners and image quality so they look "ok" in benchmarks. The FutureMark 3Dmark 2003 scam proves this. Why do they need to optimize/cheat in a benchmark that you wont play? Because it makes the numbers better for reviews........

[asch]

Originally Posted by =Sarc=

I think it's the fact that it must look at the filename to use the enhancements. Why does it run faster when the file is called FarCry.exe and slower when named FartCry.exe?

I wouldn't say that it's a fact. Where was that declared? I couldn't completely understand the translated article... but I didn't see anything that stated why the performance decreased with the renamed file. And was there a similar test with an ATI card?

[flux]

Originally Posted by Overlag

And Farcry isnt OpenGL, its D3d

I was just giving the best example I could. I'm more familiar with OpenGL and never meant to imply my example was what is happening.

Originally Posted by Overlag

You are not bias towards nvidia, but dont know the full details. Nvidia have been doing this crap since they lost the performance lead, they been cutting corners and image quality so they look "ok" in benchmarks. The FutureMark 3Dmark 2003 scam proves this. Why do they need to optimize/cheat in a benchmark that you wont play? Because it makes the numbers better for reviews........

I'm aware of the "scandal" last year and agree that these types of optimizations should not be done on benchmark tools. Again no one hides the fact that they do this. Even ATI made the same types of enhanements (just not as effectively).

I also didn't get out of that report that anything was taken out of FarCry when the name change happened. If they are taking options out that you explicitly told them to put in, well I guess that is bad, but not sure I would be upset. Sure I would want to know about the change the driver made, so I would say they should just return in a DeviceCAPS call. This way the game could detect that they don't support that feature on your system so that you don't have the option to select, but that is a game feature to implement as well.

To me this is similar to Dynamic Level of Detail which most game implement. No one complains about this when game developers do it, so why complain with the graphics card does it for a particular game? I think card mfgs are upfront about doing these types of optimizations, maybe they should be more detailed on what they are doing with each driver release.

Again, I'm not saying nvidia is being completely upfront, but i also would not limit it to just nvidia.