That's more like it.
AFAICS...
For nVidia:
You've more thoroughly defeated application detection for 3dmark 03, and further substantiated the further cheats in 4403 beyond those defeated by the 330 patch and a whole collection of other application detection routines using the checksum method you've identified (this last part is completely new ground, AFAIK). We need further analysis to determine what new mechanisms were circumvented, and whether they have potential validity outside of their context (i.e., whether they are cheats because of application for benchmarks, cheats by simply lowering quality in a clearly defined manner for benchmarks, or cheats because of application detection
and being useless for anything but benchmarking).
For the application detections, however, you've only enabled us to examine the validity of the application detection routines (which are not
necessarily invalid in any regard) more thoroughly and effectively, to evaluate "cheat" or "optimization" on a case by case basis. The game application detection is not a bad thing in and of itself.
For 3dmark 2001, you begin to give some answer as to how nVidia could cheat besides changing precision, but it isn't yet clearly established (IMO, in the absence of screenshots) that they are doing something worse than what ATI did in 3dmark 03 (yes, the image quality is different, where there was none for ATI in 3dmark 03, but I'm not aware of there being as rigid a standard of reference established for the 3dmark 2001 tests that disqualifies the verbal descriptions provided...anyone with contradicting information feel free to correct me).
There is, however, the clipping plane question based on other nVidia behavior...considering the vertex shader modification used to achieve that in 3dmark 03, I think that warrants investigation. By "script", I assume you mean what I'd consider a "wrapper"...how sophisticated is it? Can you modify camera angles, and then check fps figues? Is there a "off the rail" version of 3dmark 2001? This also establishes an unsavory precedent for the application detections, but it seems clear that clipping plane adjustments aren't the only thing nVidia is doing, and there could be some completely valid things as well.
For ATI:
It sounds like you rediscovered the 3dmark 03 GT 4 shaders ATI has acknowledged ("water and sky") and found some new 1.1 shader. It would be nice to figure out what that goes to...you're asking for the token look up to examine the code, right? Hopefully, you'll share that here for some discussion.
Again, the application detections are not
necessarily undesirable unless they are specific to benchmarks alone (because of their non general nature). Come to think of it, maybe you should check the interaction of "OptimizePVSCode" and "OptimizeTexStages" registry entries (under the "dxhal" registry path) with the detections.
I'm not too familiar with the rules for 3dmark 2001 on this, so the details of image quality changes becomes more important for determining what degree of cheating (beyond it being bad to target benchmarks specifically) is occuring. For example, I'm not aware that you can clearly say "different" is "bad" wrt to 3dmark 2001 output with any clearly established criteria...it depends on how stringent the standards are compared to those established for 3dmark 03.
I'm not aware of ATI having done any clipping plane futzing, so "invalidly activated valid optimizations" seems likely...but there are other possible methods of cheating that can be "invalid optimizations" in all contexts as well, even if not as clearly as the "off the rail" behavior of nVidia.
...
If you have a wrapper or rewrite the driver in memory or on disk, logging of activation of each cheat would be very handy for investigation, or some other way of alerting an investigator that a detection has been activated.
This functionality would be very handy, as independent determination and/or evaluation is important for issues like these...share as soon as possible.
