Nvidia Big Bang II

Huh? It was done by scripts much more often in the past than it is now. Maybe you forgot about the HUGE change that the GeForce FX series caused and that one company called Futuremark. I tend to read only sites that give detailed coverings of how they test and trust manual runs more than scripted runs. Those take much longer.

Anyway, I don't know if it's the new drivers or what but everywhere I look the GTX 260 seems to be beating the HD 4870 now, destorying the 512MB in many cases and often inching out the 1GB.

 

Hottest games for who?? I myself am eagerly waiting to play Red Alert 3, and I know many people that think it is "hotter" than any of the 5 ones tested in the reviews.
I´m not saying anything specifically about RA3, i´m just trying to say that people´s tastes vary ALOT, and those sites just CAN´T make assumptions based on that tests alone. Come on, five titles?

 

RA3's SAGE engine version should be close to the one in C&C3.
C&C3's capped at 30fps. Every card tested here should reach it. Hence I think its "relative benchmark value" would plummet quite some.

 

the architecture is still pretty much the same, be it on G92 or GT200. nvidia has only been making G80 derivates for now and some more are coming (GT212, etc.)

there's only your memory size to worry about, that issue shouldn't change.

 

Why buy a 260 GTX when SLI'd 8800GT's are faster for alot less money?? My GT's just plain murder a 260GTX.

 

Hottest games in terms of sales probably. I did say some were missing though and I agree RA3 is probably one of them.

5 games isn't many but in terms of " the biggest games to be released in December" then 5 games is a decent proportion.

Note i'm not saying the 260 is faster or slower, i'm just putting some context around the reviews comments.

 

Wonder why one of the hottest games (charts) is not on any of the nvidia-dictated review sites' lists then, can it have something to do with this?


And IMHO a big part of the problem is that these benchmarks are presented as "a new round of testing the hottest games" (we just randomly choose to do it now and with these games) and not "lets see what 180.24 brings".
And generally it's a problem comparing graphics cards's general performance on barely released games. I'm sure we'll se a big gain for hd48x0 in COD5 (very much like COD4 where there isn't that difference), just like nvidia will probably improve in NFS.

 

That doesn't explain why these same reviews also appear to have very specific pick in hardware match ups - a lot of these same reviews purely focused on GTX 260 Core 216 vs 4870 1GB, yet for a "driver improvement update" you'd expect a lot more boards to be covered than that.

 

Good point. These aren't reviews, they're free marketing.

 

It does give us a good idea of the sites that are in Nvidia's pockets.

 

So, what would be next then? A new card launches with 20+ reviews only focusing on 3dmark? "Hey, it's accurate and that's all that matters!"

Cherry picking beneficial benchmarks is withholding the truth from potential customers.

 

Exactly.

Yes, considering they were trying to evaluate the claims, that's a tad odd.
I would have liked to see a few things:
1) More than just the GTX260, since these drivers support a wide variety of products.
2) Comparison against older drivers.
3) Include not only 5 new games, but also some 'all-time benchmark classics' like Half-Life 2, 3DMark, Crysis etc (okay, some did include Crysis), to get a more general idea of where the drivers do and do not improve performance.

Personally I wasn't even that interested in the comparison with Radeon cards. I mean, it's a driver update for a card I already own. I can see why nVidia would like to show that their cards are now faster than their competitors though, with the Christmas season and all.

 

Ah but all that would have been counter to what Nvidia wanted them to show. Which is that the GTX 260 216 with this driver set is in all ways superior to the 4870 with 1 GB.

 

I'd like to know what Nvidia did in their new driver set to improve performance--Drop IQ or did they actually optimise the drivers for the games?

 

You and me both because those drivers work like shite for me.