Is that true Nvidia treat HL2benchmark like 3dmark03?

[engall]

Application Specific Optimizations?
Because maybe The Game HL2 isnt release on time.
If Value only release his benchmark.
nvidia can do it easily just like what he did in 3dmark03.

 

[Ostsol]

Something I just thought of: how would NVidia justify application specific optimizations for a game that they worked closely with the developer to create? Gabe Newell mentioned that Valve worked -very- closely with NVidia to optmize a render path to perform as well as possible on GeforceFXs.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Something I just thought of: how would NVidia justify application specific optimizations for a game that they worked closely with the developer to create? Gabe Newell mentioned that Valve worked -very- closely with NVidia to optmize a render path to perform as well as possible on GeforceFXs.

Answer: because some of the things nVidia wanted Valve to do...Valve didn't want to do due to time, image quality, stability, code maintenance reasons, or all four.

 

[Pete]

Valve is obviously taking an active interest in the honesty of nV's drivers, so I'm not too worried about cheating on HL2.

As for nV justifying app-specific optimizations, JC said that the FX architecture itself incorporates a Doom 3 optimization:

The GeForce FX is currently the fastest card we've benchmarked the Doom technology on and that's largely due to NVIDIA's close cooperation with us during the development of the algorithms that were used in Doom. They knew that the shadow rendering techniques we're using were going to be very important in a wide variety of games and they made some particular optimizations in their hardware strategy to take advantage of this and that served them well.

Are we to consider this unfair to ATi, something that has to be justified?