HardOCP's position on the 3DMark2003/Nvidia issue

Ask AV enthusiasts. They do it on a regular basis.

MuFu.

 

Little off topic, but can someone help me out with the Trident issue - and also the ati/quack deal? I must admit I missed something.

If not, maybe google will turn something up.

 

You better watch out, I'm going to forward this to the AVSForum audiophile forum.

 

Certainly, delivering fast and competitive products will pay off.

Unfortunately, while I would love to believe that..."morality" in business does always pay off, many times, it's just the opposite. Sad, but very true.

Which is why it's ultimately up to us, consumers,...to actually put value on morality by (by using our wallets). This is NOT an easy thing to do, because that can mean buying an otherwise inferior product in every way except the "morality" of the company who made it. This is exactly why morality / ethics doesn't always pay off.


If I had a nickel for every Fanboy who "pledged they would never buy a product from company X again, because company did bad thing Y", and then as soon as company X delivered a product that met their needs that pledge went out the window....well, I'd probably be able to buy one of these $500 cards.

Consumers are so shallow.

 

Quake/Quack was an issue with the Radeon 8500 not long after it came out. With those old drivers, if you changed the name of the Quake 3 executable to something else, the texture quality would increase and performance would decrease. Simply, texture quality was normally being decreased by the drivers in order to reduce bandwidth usage, thereby increasing performance. It's called Quack because that's what the site that first exposed this renamed the Quake 3 executable to.

 

Except it was limited to 5 textures total, and three of the textures were not even used in the 'most popular' benchmarked maps.

I had a 8500 then, and you know what...I've seen worse screen shots on the 3Dvelocity review where the LOD bias on the 5800 is tanked so bad that it would make Quack look awesome.

The big thing Bennett made out of Quack was finding the 'reference' to Quake, which was in the drivers since the Original Radeon, unknowing to him. He made it look like the reference was introduced for the 8500 launch, and it was most certainly not, nor was accepting a application from a competing IHV ethical.

Payback is a bitch.

 

He was tipped off so didnt know all the facts.. happened again with that AMD deal showing of BAPCO's Sysmark as being biased towards Intel Processors.

At least ET's work was original with maybe some help from DaveB (or not).

People in glass houses should not throw stones.

 

Thank you.

First time I have heard of it. Thanks.

 

Exactly! I've been conveying the exact same thing with regards to the Quake.exe. It was in previous drivers way before the 8500 was launched. In fact I swear it was for Radeon 64Mb DDR cards and when the 8500 came out it is when it screwed up.

Didn't the Quake.exe actually improve performance without suffering any IQ for the original Radeon 64Mb which this Quake.exe was intended for?

 

Ohhh the Irony

http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=MTEzLDM=

 

"The big thing Bennett made out of Quack was finding the 'reference' to Quake, which was in the drivers since the Original Radeon, unknowing to him. He made it look like the reference was introduced for the 8500 launch, and it was most certainly not, nor was accepting a application from a competing IHV ethical."

I saw a post of his today where he stated they found the reference in 7 of 13 previous driver sets...........FWIW

 

jjayb: you wrote this as a far out would-be-case to explain your thought but Nvidia is getting that me (and probably many more guys) think that case is not a "would-be" but a very real possibility.

(just reading page 4 but had to post).

 

I think the question about confidentiality and being a beta member has been addressed.

As for my "degrading" B3D's reputation, I stated clearly that my opinions were my personal ones and do not necessarily represent B3D's official opinion. I think I am entitled to state so every time I say anything anywhere, even with my signature clearly showing my affiliation. I may be married but everytime I say something, it does not automatically mean my wife agrees with me!

 

Of course not.

But you damn well better agree with everything SHE says! 8)

 

Did you miss the part where he was laughing at Trident's ameture attempt to detect the quake exe? You know what they say about the difference between a good thief and a bad thief.

Let me just state where I'm comming from for the record. To me the differences I've seen between ATI and Nvidia cards really aren't that large when you really stop and think about it. Reviews just tend to over magnify the little pieces. Not that it isn't extremely interesting from a technology standpoint! I do read this site for a reason, after all.

However, the differences between the big 2 and the rest is large in the 3D gaming industry. Right now I'd feel comfortable buying a card from ATI or Nvidia because I know developers will make sure there games work well for the most part on both cards. Right now I have a GeForce2 GTS and I'm eyeing a new card around the $150. I'll probably wait until I can get a card with a 256bit bus at that price or a game I get just will not run decent enough with my current card.

 

If I do disagree with anything she says, I'd just keep my mouth shut in public but I'd tell her why I disagree with her though!

 

I don't think there is enough data to firmly land into either theory on this event at this point in time.

The two sides seem to be "it's a cheat" vs "it's a bug"- and unlike the ATI Quake/Quack debacle in the past, there is a land-slide of evidence pointing towards "cheat", but it still hasnt been brought forth to same level by doing any research/homework.

I would think, at the very least, to solidify ExtremeTech's evidence, there needs to be a little more research work performed in order to baffle the alleged cheat to provide a more correct, visible result but without the improved performance.

If the "cheat" theory suggests there is something quite specific (to the screen region even) mask/filter being kludged into 3dmark2003 in only a couple of tests, then there needs to be a proper control created to proof this theory. Be it though initialization changes or binary kludging to baffle the 3dmark2003 identification that they are alleging it does, or if this cannot be handled, then to find other games and titles that illustrate the same behavior from a wrongful guess on the part of the drivers.

If this kind of control can be produced, then you pretty much seal the reality. Until then, you have nothing but a bunch of theories- some having more weight than others, but nothing 100% determined. Just a lot of rationale bargaining and motive grasping.

 

And why shouldn't I laugh? Sometimes you have to detect an application because of a HW problem. If you did it by name, then your fix is disabled and who knows what would happen. For example, the customer installs a game patch which renames the executable (I've seen this happen, BTW). Other times you have legitimate optimizations for a particular application (don't wait on condition X, for example). Again, you don't want these being disabled because the name of the executable changes.

Obviously, what Trident was doing was not legitimate, but to be caught so easily is laughable because anyone can rename an executable.

So I'm the bad guy now, eh? If it makes you feel better to think so, then go right ahead; I'm not going to lose any sleep over it.

 

Yes, i didn't see the quote on B3D. Even if some parts have not:
- Treatment of other beta members
- The hardware site of the beta program being spokemen of FM.

Sure, but till your wife doesn't say anything, she agrees And more over as her husband you can easily change her mind

 

Evildeus....that straw keeps getting thinner and thinner...... sonn you will need a pair of tweezers to grasp it!