Following yesterday’s exposure of NVIDIA and ATI cheating in Futuremark’s 3DMark03, News.com quoted an unnamed NVIDIA official who claims that Futuremark intentionally developed a benchmark that presented certain products of the Santa Clara California-based GPU and logic design firm in a bad light.

According to the representative, since NVIDIA was not part of the Futuremark Beta Program (a program which costs of hundreds of thousands of dollars to participate in), NVIDIA did not get a chance to work with Futuremark on writing the shaders like they would with a real applications developer. NVIDIA did not know what Futuremark had done, but they think the benchmark developer had intentionally tried to create a scenario that makes NVIDIA’s products look bad.

The incognito official from NVIDIA did not say anything on NVIDIA’s cheats in Detonator FX drivers in order to achieve higher results in the benchmark. I also have not found anything from ATI Technologies about their cheats in CATALYST drivers that influenced 3DMark03 scores.

Now NVIDIA has to bring proofs of its allegations and if they do, Futuremark will have to explain the reasons of implementing such scenario.

(Un)Named officials from NVIDIA Corporation, ATI Technologies, Silicon Integrated Systems, Matrox Graphics, 3Dlabs, Trident and Futuremark may email their comments to me.