X-bit Watch: NVIDIA's Hardcore Cheating in Drivers Causes Cards to Run Fast?

by Grigoriy Gubankov
05/20/2003 | 12:09 PM

As you have probably heard, with the release of Futuremark’s 3DMark03 benchmark relations between its developer and NVIDIA Corporation were badly damaged. NVIDIA said that 3DMark03 game-benchmarks unfairly favoured graphics cards based on ATI RADEON 8xxx and 9xxx-series graphics processors while solutions powered by GPUs from NVIDIA showed too weak performance in the latest FutureMark’s benchmark. NVIDIA was so dissatisfied with this fact that it left FutureMark's beta program in late 2002.

Starting from February this year some strange things with 3DMark03 and NVIDIA Detonator drivers have happened. There were famous Detonator 42.68 drivers with improved performance in 3DMark03. There was NVIDIA pressuring some online media in an attempt to avoid benchmarking the GeForce FX 5800 Ultra with 3DMark03 (see our news-story here). And now there are two more episodes involving NVIDIA Detonator drivers and FutureMark 3DMark03 benchmark.

French 3Dchips.fr web-site has found that during 3DMark2001 SE Dragothic scene with the GeForce FX 5600 Ultra and FSAA and anisotropic filtering turned on the dragon disappears, leaving the Amazon mysteriously flying without any hard surface under. You can read about this strange thing in French here (translated version here).

The latter case is quite serious and can even give some ground for rather unpleasant conclusion about NVIDIA’s driver optimisation policy. ExtremeTech observed NVIDIA GeForce FX cards using developer version of 3DMark03 and recently released 44.03 Detonator FX drivers. The developer version, which is available only to selected partners of FutureMark, and lets not only to watch the benchmark scenes, but also to pause them and move the camera freely through the whole scene. Using this ability of 3DMark03 ExtremeTech has found that if you move the camera anywhere outside the “normal” path, i.e. the path, it travels during ordinary benchmarking, the image on the screen gets seriously distorted in some strange way. ExtremeTech sent a report about this problem to NVIDIA and the company answered that it has no access to developer version of 3DMark03, since it is no longer a member of 3DMark Beta Program. The respond of the company is at least a strange one and analysts now think that there are some aggressive performance optimisations in the new drivers, such as custom clip planes or absence of full Z-buffer clearing. In short, graphics cards based on NVIDIA’s GPUs show better results in 3DMark03 now. Obviously, such optimizations only work in 3DMark03, not in real games. It is not a fact that NVIDIA cheats with drivers in order to achieve higher scores in synthetic benchmarks, but still read ExtremeTech's findings here.

And more about computer graphics. Not For Idiots web-site has posted a thorough article about a thing that can be found in any modern GPU – a graphics pipeline. Of course, we all heard about a number of pipelines in a graphics processor or a number of texturing module units per pipeline, but there are many different peculiarities of modern GPU pipelines that seriously affect the performance and efficiency of the pipeline itself and the GPU in general. So, if you want to know a lot of new things about a building block of modern GPUs, read the article here.

Mini-ITX standard is promoted quite aggressively by VIA Technologies for quiet and small PCs. Because Mini-ITX was actually invented by VIA, the majority of Mini-ITX mainboards feature only VIA chipsets and C3 processors from the same company with no upgrade options. But it appears that times have changed. Hexus.net has reviewed a Mini-ITX mainboard made by Commel featuring i845G-series chipset with integrated graphics core. It supports Intel Pentium 4 and Celeron processors with 400 or 533MHz Quad Pumped Bus, so, you can install even a high-end processor with loads of power and 533MHz QPB. Hexus.net concluded that this is not an excellent mainboard, but has a couple of drawbacks. Read the full article here.

You have definitely heard about E3 exhibition which took place last week in Los-Angeles, California. But if you were not able to visit it, this paragraph is for you. Sharky Extreme has posted a coverage of this exciting event. Of course, there are a lot of talks about upcoming games, game trailers and so on. You can read Day 1 and Day 2 parts here and here, respectively.

French VTR-Hardware has reviewed a couple of coolers from TR2, a low-cost cooler trademark recently launched by well-known Thermaltake company. Despite their target market segment, these coolers show very good results, even against famous and more expensive Volcano 7+ products from Thermaltake itself. Read the comparison in French here. The translated version is available here.