Demirug said:
Reverend, you say that games and synthetics don’t link well in current reviews and you are right. But how should we link them together if we don’t understand what the games are doing? Games developers normally don’t open their little “magic books†for you. And even more worse they sometime didn’t even tell you the truth.
Well, I doubt they would flatout
lie about things... more like "avoiding the question". And that's understandable given that their livelihoods depend on seling games. They really couldn't care too much about purist/altruistic hw website reporters.
As for the problem you rightfully brought up, I refuse to believe it cannot be solved. It takes a lot of effort (and it also means you need to have the knowledge and know-how, as per your reverse-engineer games comment below) but I believe such an effort will prove far more useful and beneficial to the public.
Knowing and reporting how and why games are made the way they appear on the shelves given the amount of tie-ups between IHVs and ISVs as well as actual hw architectures and their behaviours can be much more useful to the hw buying public (we need to agree that this is the ultimate aim of a website) than knowing the intricasies of the ADDs, MULs, Texs, etc operations of an architecture.
Otherwise the latest and greatest hw remain "the latest and greatest hw with the latest and greatest unfulfilled potential".
I remember a list of games that allegedly use SM3 and don’t do it at all.
That list comes from IHVs, right?
This will force anybody who want to link synthetics and games together to reverse engineer the games that are used in the review. This is a hard and time consuming job.
Yes it is. It needs to be done, however. You spend a huge amount of time investigating the architectures of a piece of hw. That time becomes useless if you can't prove, with games, what it all means. Which is more important?
But does it matter? I am still seeing many people “reading†only the bars and numbers in a review. How many people really want to know the dirty secrets that are hidden inside a game? A reviewer who have to pay the bills form this work need to write what the readers want or they will go away.
And the bars and numbers really are all that matter, truthfully. But they need to be explained. Hence, what I said above.
Remember I suggested that there can be a "games only review" as well as a "architecture only investigation" type of articles, and as circumstances demand, a link between the two.
The "dirty secrets" behind a game is just as important as the "dirty secrets behind a piece of hw and/or its drivers". Both have their audience, especially at this site.
In the end, it comes down to what a site is about. I don't think Dave needs to have "games benchmark reviews" out the same time as all the other privileged NDA'ed sites. His "no games benchmark here, you can get them elsewhere" R520 article is proof. So maybe this means he really isn't all that concerned about the heavy-traffic=money games-benchmarks audience. Hence my suggestion.
