micron said:
Futuremark isnt going to do anything to piss Nvidia off again. They cant afford too. Without Nvidia, Futuremark will sink. you cannot have a benchmark that only lets one of the top two IHV's play. I'm talking about the refusal of letting FX cards submit and publish scores here...
The problem with that line of reasoning for me is that prior to December '02 FM had both IHVs paying dues and as members, and yet still managed to piss off nVidia enough to cause them to quit. Having them both paying you dues is no guarantee you can keep both happy. Goes to the conflict of interest I mentioned in another thread.
Second part is FM never disallowed anyone. nVidia elected to quit the program--had nothing to do with a decision by FM.
Third is that I thought the "refusal of FX cards to post scores" had nothing to do with FX cards, but rather particular driver sets which cheated the benchmark. Fact is, I think, if FM allows scores to be posted with driver sets which cheat the benchmark, or are special-case optimized, and also allows scores to be posted from products using driver sets that don't cheat and have few if any special-case ops for 3dMk, the benchmark itself is compromised and all such scores become automatically invalid.
Only way to get around that is simply to say: "We don't care who misrepresents his products through our software--let the best liar win"...
That approach, of course, makes 3dMk worthless to everybody as the scores it produces will have little to do with how the various products benched will actually run the bulk of 3d games. It then becomes a cosmic exersize in futility, of which the only beneficiary is FutureMark's bank account.
I cannot see the attraction for IHV's for this reason. Sure, the benchmark may well be just a rubber-stamp for the IHVs, but if everybody knows it, what good will it do the IHVs? I for one have never made a 3d-card purchase based on the results of an FM benchmark, and I never will. Those scores are the absolute least criteria I might ever pay attention to.
I took FM's side in this initially because their audit report was so clear and concise and well-reasoned, and proved its point so well that it convinced me that FM was a software company intent on protecting the credibility of its software above all else. It also helped that many of nVidia's cheats were so blatant and undeniable, and so visible. However, ever since that initial audit report the quality and tone of "information" coming out of FM regarding the issues raised in the audit report has been severely degraded, muddy, and apologetic.
I still hold to my original belief that the people within FM who wanted to defend the integrity of their software--regardless of whether or not that "pissed off" an IHV--were the people who wrote the original audit report, and that they have been overruled by other factions in the company which simply don't care about anything except securing payment from IHVs. It's unfortunate, but that's the way it is. Since the company no longer feels that defending its software is more important than enlisting IHVs to pay dues, it would be kind of foolish for me to keep defending them. Since FM never gave nVidia the boot in the first place, but nVidia booted itself out of the program, I just find it ludicrous that they suggest that getting nVidia back in somehow improves the "quality and impartiality" of 3dMK03. It was just as "impartial" when nVidia quit as it is today now that nVidia's back to paying them fees. The difference is in the fees not the "quality and impartiality." If anything this attitude suggests that both the quality and impartiality of FM's benches will diminish even as FM's bank account gets fatter. Don't they realize nothing could have possibly proved their "impartiality" any more than suffering the slings and arrows of nVidia's rebuke and exposing nVidia's efforts to cheat their software? I guess not.
