It reads to me more nuanced than what I would have thot from the reaction here. Possibly wrong-headed, but I think he is reaching for something here that could be of value. It seems to me that he has a a key idea here that most of his edifice is built on:
"We are going to see D3D games that behave differently within the same API. As the video card companies move forward with developing tighter bonds with game developers and publishing houses, there is no doubt we are going to see more hardware specific effects in games. Depending on your hardware, your game experience may differ. To what extent is yet to be seen, but we think that this alone will show that the days of apples to apples is coming to a close as the proprietary hardware technologies diverge. While this is just speculation, we think that NVIDIA moving some of their high-end business to IBM will facilitate this happening more rapidly as each faction of the video wars becomes a bit more shielded from each other’s technology." Later on, he adds: "Also, we do think we will see a hardware specific title in the next 24 months if not sooner. While we hope we are wrong on this, it does look that a console-type business model will be tested out in the PC gaming arena."
If he's right on that (which with my extremely limited understanding of things I thought that was what DirectX had put an end to, more or less) he may have a point.
A couple other interesting points:
I've edited a chunk below together that seems to me connected, but I warn you in advance that this is my editing. I find them connected, others might call it selective editing. You don't like it; go read for yourself:
"Quite simply, NVIDIA has changed the rules of synthetic benchmarking. Synthetics were understood to be free standing utilities that were not optimized for. We think that is how the hardware community saw these tools. . .NVIDIA is optimizing for benchmarks quite clearly and that is something we will have to deal with. It seems certain that they are not alone in doing that, but from what information we have been privy to in the last month it certainly seems to us that NVIDIA is doing a bit more optimizing than their competition. . .When 3DMark03 recently fell from grace, we knew there were sure to be others. This is far from over in my opinion. "
And finally the payoff: "We have an idea that the gaming and hardware communities need to come together and form a not-for-profit organization to work on this issue as a team. Benchmarking for money is simply out of the question as FutureMark has proven that business model to be full of holes to say the least. Our communities need to self-regulate and decide how to best facilitate the needs of the consumer that ultimately pay all our bills."
What's wrong with that? Will an IHV dare to cheat a test that is backed by, say, the 10 largest review websites, when the agreement also states that a finding of c/h/e/a/t/i/n/g/ "inappropriate optimization" will ban them from coverage on ALL of those sites for a period of, say, 6 months?
Okay, rip me a new one now.
