How can a GFFX5900 be the "fastest card on the market" if it isn't on the market yet?
at any rate here's a reply to Nvidia's reply...
http://slashdot.org/
"Futuremark replies Posted Tuesday, May 27 by nzaweird
We had a chance to get the follow up remarks of Tero Sarkkinen's, Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Futuremark, regarding the recent claims of Nvidia.
HardAve: In light of the recent struggles between your 3DMark2003 and Nvidia's driver set, we would like to hear your remarks regarding Nvidia's claims your software intentionally put the GeforceFX product in bad light after Nvidia passed on the opportunity in becoming a beta program partner of Futuremark's. On top of this, with the new 330 patch, it appears 3DMark2003 is the only benchmark showing the GeforceFX 5900Ultra well behind the competition, where other apps like UT2003 and Doom3 showcase the exact opposite. Why is this?
Tero Sarkkinen: Any suggestion that Futuremark would intentionally penalize or favor any specific hardware in our products is absurd and NOT TRUE. And please note that we are not attacking here, we are just defending our product.
We are in the business of making objective benchmarks and we intend to keep it that way. We respect deeply our BETA members, which include the biggest in the industry, and they all have participated in the development of 3DMark03. NVIDIA themselves was an active member of the BETA program until December 2002.
NVIDIA's claim that "since they are not a beta partner, they do not get a chance to write shaders like they would with real applications developer" is irrelevant and to us it seems like an attempt to shift discussion to a different topic. The topic here is that the drivers special cased 3DMark03 and resulted in an incorrect score which made false representation of their products' performance in 3DMark03.
3DMark03 was developed strictly according to DirectX9 standard in very close cooperation with Microsoft and other BETA members. If hardware performs well 3DMark03, it performs well in all applications that use DirectX 9. Note that since 3DMark is designed to be an objective evaluation tool, it does _not_ include manufacturer-specific optimizations. This is why it is exceptionally well suitable for objective performance measurement.
Since we all now see how tempting it is to try to cheat in a benchmark, we have started to work with our partners in order to develop new structures and processes to weed out cheating and unfair play in all benchmarks. This is a business opportunity for us, since due to our role and position we are better suited to act in this role than e.g. game benchmark providers. We welcome all interested parties to work with us in this important initiative.
NVIDIA is an extremely capable company with great products. We welcome them to continue the competition in the hardware development with fair means.
In reply to your more specific question, 3DMark03 is a forward looking DirectX 9 benchmark. It stresses the hardware with workloads that will be typical of DirectX 9 games. Thus, hardware's performance in Unreal Tournament 2003 does not necessarily bear relation to that how that hardware will perform in DirectX 9 workloads, which make an extensive use of pixel and vertex shading. Doom 3 is not a published product yet but we have seen few reviews. Based on those reviews, it seems that in Doom 3 there are performance differences depending on which codepath is used for different hardware. Not much more can be said at this time, as the application is not ready and not available for public testing (although we very much would like to see it
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