Another side of the story

[Arun]

Justice is fair.
Injustice is even fairer...

But I believe it is important to realize this issue got out of hand. It was a big issue, agreed. We absolutely had to be vocal about it, agreed. But *that* much? No, I don't think so.
And why that? Simply because 99% of nVidia is perfectly innocent. From my understanding, this is an initiative by a small part of the driver team - not even most of it.


Uttar

 

[jb]

Justice is fair.
Injustice is even fairer...

But I believe it is important to realize this issue got out of hand. It was a big issue, agreed. We absolutely had to be vocal about it, agreed. But *that* much? No, I don't think so.
And why that? Simply because 99% of nVidia is perfectly innocent. From my understanding, this is an initiative by a small part of the driver team - not even most of it.
Uttar

WTF are you talking about? This shakes the very foundataion that all benchmark scores use. It complete remove trust from reviewers and their tools. How are they to know that new Demos in q3 will show different scores? How many more cheats...errr optimizations are there? All of this by a company that says they dont optimize for specific games not to mention benchmark. No Uttar, this is a very very big deal. NV has reamed us and hurt are trust in the pass. This time they killed all of what was left. It does not matter if its only 1 guy..as it only takes 1 guy to hurt a companies reputation...

 

[andypski]

And why that? Simply because 99% of nVidia is perfectly innocent. From my understanding, this is an initiative by a small part of the driver team - not even most of it.

Don't you think that modern source code control techniques make it quite difficult to sneak things into a driver codebase without the other driver engineers noticing?

 

[sonix666]

andypski, believe me, when developing on a project, people don't tend to put valueable time in reviewing everything that another developer does. So, no, I doubt that it would be hard to sneak such suspicious code in the driver base.

 

[sonix666]

WTF are you talking about? This shakes the very foundataion that all benchmark scores use. It complete remove trust from reviewers and their tools. How are they to know that new Demos in q3 will show different scores? How many more cheats...errr optimizations are there? All of this by a company that says they dont optimize for specific games not to mention benchmark. No Uttar, this is a very very big deal. NV has reamed us and hurt are trust in the pass. This time they killed all of what was left. It does not matter if its only 1 guy..as it only takes 1 guy to hurt a companies reputation...

Hold your horses. Right now, all the issues evolve around 3DMark2003 and noone has yet detected cheating anywhere else. People on the forums of www.aceshardware.com even tested if renaming UT2003.exe and D3DDrv.dll would influence the scores in Unreal Tournament 2003. And they didn't. So either, the optimizations are general, or for that specific Unreal engine, or they have very ingenius hacks.

 

[andypski]

andypski, believe me, when developing on a project, people don't tend to put valueable time in reviewing everything that another developer does. So, no, I doubt that it would be hard to sneak such suspicious code in the driver base.

That's funny - what sort of projects are you talking about? Because on the projects that I work on a very active interest is taken in what is being checked in, and a large amount of valuable time is taken in reviewing additions. It's all part of the quality assurance process.

 

[Dio]

More to the point, do you not think there is some regular performance testing of the drivers where sudden large increases would get noticed? I can see the email chain now...

"Hey, performance went up 20% today! Who did that?"
<stony silence>
"Well, who cares!"

This never happens.

 

[Clashman]

I didn't see this option in the poll:

C) Nvidia threatened to run them out of business via their army of laywers and near endless cash reserves.

Here you go ... since more wanted this , HUMUS realy convinced me there really can be such a situation .

And look at where the votes are already.

 

[LeStoffer]

And why that? Simply because 99% of nVidia is perfectly innocent. From my understanding, this is an initiative by a small part of the driver team - not even most of it.

I'm not entirely sure what your point is, but even if it was only a small part of the driver team that put this into effect, it is extremely naive to suggest or think that the management at nVidia - and they are the ones who represent the company - was clueless about this happening or afterwards didn't care about the damage it may have inflicted on its business. Sure most at nVidia is 'innocent' - in fact I bet that the majority opposed this taking place afterwards - but the idea that the executive board at nVidia is prepared to downplay this internally as just some jolly chaps having some jolly fun is absurd IMHO.

 

[sonix666]

For some parts of the code we do code review. But that normally takes only one other person. Not the whole team.

 

[David G.]

Here , here , big quiestion: Why hasn't anybody comented the Tech-Report test officially ?

Did nVIDIA silenced FutureMark for good or we should expect one 3DMark03 patch for every nVIDIA driver release ?

 

[Tahir2]

Here , here , big quiestion: Why hasn't anybody comented the Tech-Report test officially ?

Did nVIDIA silenced FutureMark for good or we should expect one 3DMark03 patch for every nVIDIA driver release ?

Futuremark have been silenced.

 

[Sage]

I suspect that most engineers at nvidia give a damn about their creations and would never want to see them ridiculed so badly for cheating. But, they also have to take care of themselves and their families which means getting a paycheck, which means being the managements bitch sometimes. we all have done that at some time, I'm sure. The people to blame are the management and possibly a very few engineers, the rest are just following orders because they have to or are kept out of the loop on these things.

 

[Doomtrooper]

I do think you will see this....

1) Nvidia will Rejoin the Beta Program

2) There will be about a month wait

3) There will be a patch from Futuremark (lets call it Patch 340) that will allow FX cards to use the DX9 _pp hint.


If I'm wrong I will eat my shoe.

I check the Beta program membership daily waiting for that Logo to appear

It is starting:

1) http://www.futuremark.com/pressroom/pressreleases/?081203



Waiting for the new patch now..

 

[WaltC]

...
NVidia has already proven they don't need to join the beta program nor pay FM any fees at all to have their way with them.

This has been an observation of mine as well. The only answer I can come up with is that nVidia legal has pointed out nVidia would be in a dicey lawsuit position should nVidia not be a paying member and the company go out of business at a time when nVidia is in open and public opposition to them and their software. In such a position I don't see how nVidia could avoid paying damages. Being a paying member would isolate them from those charges regardless of what has transpired over the last 9 months.

Come to think of it, is FM a private corporation? If so nVidia might be rejoining, but as a silent partner with a direct stake in the company. Just guessing...

 

[WaltC]

It is starting:

1) http://www.futuremark.com/pressroom/pressreleases/?081203



Waiting for the new patch now..

Heh... At least the body of the press release says "re-joined"....I thought from some earlier statements I read that they might be publicizing it with no mention of the fact that this is not nVidia's first up as a "partner"....

 

[Dave H]

I do think you will see this....

1) Nvidia will Rejoin the Beta Program

2) There will be about a month wait

3) There will be a patch from Futuremark (lets call it Patch 340) that will allow FX cards to use the DX9 _pp hint.


If I'm wrong I will eat my shoe.

I check the Beta program membership daily waiting for that Logo to appear

It is starting:

1) http://www.futuremark.com/pressroom/pressreleases/?081203



Waiting for the new patch now..

Of course, the _pp hint should be used in any PS 2.0 shader where the extra bits of precision are not necessary. (Which is probably most of those in 3dMark03.) They are part of the DX9 spec, and any neutral DX9 benchmark should use them where appropriate.

None of this is to say that FutureMark wasn't completely right to expose Nvidia for cheating in all sorts of ways on 3dMark03, or shouldn't be continuing to release patches to detect and disable any new cheats targeting patch 330 (which are almost certain to exist--in fact, known to exist in at least one case). In fact, the use of the _pp hint in 3dMark03 is neither here nor there, considering in the time frame of this whole controversy, non-quadro NV3x drivers treated all PS 2.0 code as if the _pp hint had been used.

Point is, if it hadn't been used, it probably should have, at least in many cases.

 

[jb]

Problem is how do they do this an remain fair? Remember when 3dmark2001SE came out? They added the PS1.4 test but did not let that add to the current scores? I fell the same thing should be done here.

 

[Doomtrooper]

Exactly I remember Worm and Me having some good disagreements on here about the lack of PS 1.4 included in scoring, and repeatedly stated the reason was that it would make their Database of scoring invalid...let us see if the same applies here.

 

[Nazgul]

Problem is how do they do this an remain fair? Remember when 3dmark2001SE came out? They added the PS1.4 test but did not let that add to the current scores? I fell the same thing should be done here.

Personally, I'd love to see them implement a 3-stage pixel shader test. All three runs would render the same scene, 1) with all shaders using full-precision, 2) with all shaders using partial-precision, 3) with a mixture of each. Making it a part of the final score would be tough, but adding it in like the PS1.4 test in 3DM2K1SE would be nice.