Says the company which previously hacked the drivers to be higher in benchmarks... Well that was ATI on its own back then, but still - not such a good idea for people who remember that.
In the appendix of that Futuremark report, the screen caps are rendered so badly, it looks more like serious driver bugs than cheating. Why were Futuremark so sure it's not bad drivers or some other technical fault? Malice vs. incompetence etc.
They state that those rendering errors are only visible when using free-camera mode, not the standard pre-defined camera. That's why it looks buggy, it was never "optimized" to look well outside of the benchmark's default camera settings.
They also point out that preventing NVIDIA drivers from detecting 3DMark results in the scene being rendered correctly.
If these claims are true NVIDIA can't shift the blame to some incompetent programmer.
- They both widely "cheat" on games. If Game A asks for X, the driver returns Y. Usually this improves the user experience, but sometimes it is done more for benchmarkship.
- They both heavily optimize for benchmarks.
- In one case, AMD crossed the lean and their optimization did not return identical results as non-optimized.
Whether or not AMD did this deliberately is up for debate. If you've ever had to optimize something, you know how easy it is to screw up and return stale cache results or screw up in some other way.
Yes, AMD deserved to get slapped for their mistake, but I don't think one incidence is evidence of a culture any worse than NVidia's.
Ah, don't get me wrong, I did not mean to say nvidia is any better. I was just amused that both companies say "we're the best", both are known to have a "creative" approach to benchmarking and one of them sets a challenge with "prove you're the best with benchmarks".
