Reverend said:
This post is supposed to be light-hearted in manner, so don't get too serious
I have said a few times that the trust is lost since the NVIDIA-3DMark03 cheating issue.
If NVIDIA were to issue a statement like :
"What we did is not right wrt 3DMark03. We are sorry if this means that all benchmarks -- game or synthetic -- conducted on NVIDIA boards/drivers are never to be trusted due to the implications involved as a result of this issue. In our effort to provide the best software running on our hardware, sometimes decisions are made that ultimately proves to be the incorrect ones. We like to believe our hardware and its supporting drivers are among the best available. We hope this 3DMark03 incidence do not lead the public to believe otherwise."
... would it be acceptable to you guys, and for you guys to "forgive and forget"?
Completely hypothetical NVIDIA statement by me, of course. Jenson had admitted NV30 was a "mistake" -- admitting another mistake is not impossible
I'd say admitting nv35 is basically the revised ghost of nv30 with crap drivers, though, is highly unlikely...
I could forgive--and quite possibly forget, eventually--if nVidia would come out and say:
"We regret the recent unfortunate incidents surrounding our drivers and 3D Mark. We didn't think we were doing anything wrong by optimizing our drivers to present a best-case performance picture which differs from what our drivers will routinely deliver in real 3D games. We apologize to any of our customers who might have inferred a level of perfomance for our products because of the exaggerated performance they produce running 3D Mark 03 320. It was not our intention to imply that all 3D games run on our hardware like 3D Mark 03 320, which is a highly optimized, best-case scenario not intended to represent the mean level of performance you can expect from our products.
"We recognize the inconvenience this may have caused some of our customers, specifically those who may have purchased any of our nv3x-based products. To that end we would recommend they run version 330 of the benchmark which neutralizes the majority of our best-case optimization and will provide a much more accurate picture of the way our products can be expected to perform when running most D3d games. Also, we would like to assure our customers with an "optimization-free pledge" that from henceforth all of our drivers will no longer recognize any benchmark of any type, or timedemo, etc. We have learned that honesty is important to our customers, and we would like to begin providing it to them. Additionally, as some of our driver optimizations remain even after the 330 patch, our next Detonator release will expunge the last of them so that we may honor our committment to our customers, whom we have of late come to see as very important to us.
"However, we at nVidia are very excited about ID Software's upcoming Doom 3 game. Our driver guys are knocking their dicks in the dirt to bring you the highest frame rates possible in Doom 3--we want you to know that, "Damn the image quality--full speed ahead!" is a reverberating shriek often heard from our little cadre of Doom 3 driver optimizers! Candidly, and in advance, we want you to know exciting facts like these ahead of time (this time.)
"It is true that as time permits we are able to highly optimize our drivers for that handful of 3D games we feel will be most popular. Does our lavish attention on that scant 1% of 3D games that ship mean that we neglect the rest? On the contrary, for the other 99% of 3D games that ship we make every effort to abide by API conventions. In truth, we really don't have the time or inclination to heavily optimize for all those other games because the web sites which review our products never use those games to demonstrate our hardware. Nope, it's Quake, Quake, Quake, and Doom, Doom, Doom, all of the time--so that's really all we have time for, if you want to know the truth. In other words, we don't "optimize" for those games apart from the usual routine bug fix from time to time. That's why in our re-commitment to honesty here at nVidia we encourage you to run version 330 of 3DMark 03--so you'll have a much clearer picture of what you can expect of our performance in most games.
"Thank you for listening. That is all. Truly."
.....
(Actually, I copied this verbatim from the latest Mad magazine's "Apologies we'd love to hear" section....)
