On Sun, 2007-03-25 at 18:43 +0200, Stefan Dösinger wrote:
Does anyone here know if the NVIDIA Windows drivers are still rigged with regards to the various 3DMark suite of benchmarks? There was a scandal a while back, and the company claimed to pull their special hacks out, but then they were caught again later doing the same thing. It'd be a shame if we were testing rigged Windows drivers vs unrigged Linux ones.
I think the windows driver has a huge game Database with per game optimizations. I think I saw it in their control applet, you can even change the settings. (I don't have a access to a Windows nvidia machine atm).
Last I knew the Linux driver allows similar tuning. And if someone wants to he can write a specialized wine patch and put a per game hack collection somewhere. I personally don't think theres anything wrong if nvidia provides me with fine-tuned per game settings. Honestly I wouldn't put hundreds of hacks into my own code, but if nvidia thinks they can manage that, ok with me :-)
"Optimizations" aren't the issue here - hacks that break the application but still make the benchmark appear to render fine are.
Here is an article discussing the issue: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1086025,00.asp
Essentially, they completely broke the rendering engine by hard-coding assumptions about where the camera would be into the driver. Move the camera slightly (such as in the developer version of 3D Mark), and everything is a garbled mess.
This defeats the entire purpose of a benchmark as a real-application performance test, since the benchmark is converted from a simulation of real game rendering calculations to instead be a glorified movie.
Thanks, Scott Ritchie