Since its release, many have been complaining that the widespread use of synthetic benchmarks such as 3Dmark is hurting the industry by making the graphics companies focus on high benchmark numbers and not focusing on the games. What is S3’s stance on this?
Young: I was first in line for complaining about our whole net worth as a company coming down to one benchmark number. Unfortunately, this is the way human beings are. They tend to want to apply a linearly variable number that associates value to things. i.e. horsepower, carat weight, square footage and so on.
Of course we want other measures, games being one of them. Unfortunately, the bulk of our OEM customers do not have the time to really understand all the games out there and they tend to want to focus on a minimal linear measurement such as benchmarks. This is where the design wins are so we have to play the game. (no pun!)
This is really a bad predicament that companies have themselves in. Its like they're caught in a loop, its complained that they need to focus more time on games, yet people use benchmarks, mostly 3DMark, to determine whether they want to buy the product. So in order to keep people buying their product they are forced to focus time on maximizing benchmarks.
