The Way its Meant to be Reviewed?

You're on a roll for putting things in nutshells tonight! Read the sentence above if you haven't already everyone. This spells it our very clearly as to where I'm coming from.

 

Isn't Beyond3D a member of Futuremark's Beta program?

http://futuremark.com/betaprogram/

Wouldn't it be fair to say that being a member of the Beta program would give you an unfair bias in writing an article such as this?

 

Thanks for mentioning this. I'd like to dig a bit deeper though and ask you to elaborate if any of the confusion, biasedness, etc you alluded to was ever present in one of my reviews in your opinion. Probably best to take it offline via chat or email. Just an open invitation at your convenience. I never want to be viewed as being biased or not trustworthy. So, I welcome any thoughts, concerns, etc you may have about my reviews (or anyone else's at nV News).

 

I'm starting to feel like you two are avoiding answering this one for a reason....Volt didn't hit a nerve, did he? 8)

 

Huh...how 'bout dem apples?

Why is B3D "just" a "BETA Member Level" and not an "Active" or "Strategic" status? I see that these are the perks of BETA status:

• Access to specification documents, alphas, betas and release candidate code drops of benchmarks

• Email based communication and briefing

• Troubleshooting for drivers and new technology

• 10% discount for Professional versions of Futuremark benchmarks, if bundled

• Free site license to pro versions

• Benchmark version featuring Member company logos for promotion purposes

 

I guess my response is "How can it NOT affect an article authored by B3D"? You are part of a Beta program that helps further the development of a synthetic benchmark. Now you are writing articles that attempt to legitimize an industry you are helping develop.

Isn't that the case?

 

Ease up on the innuendo Digi...I know that's tough for you though. Nah, no nerve tingling here. I simply don't answer questions that I have no answer to. I defered it to MikeC already so you can wait for him to respond or ask him directly.

 

True enough Dave and worth reiterating. I kind of drove this thread down the "yip yip yip about 3DMark03 for the millionth time" which I didn't really mean to do...was just using it as an example since it's the most widely recognized.

It does remain an interesting question and one I'd like to get a more direct answer from you on.

 

Providing feedback?

It looks as though you are providing Editorials on the benefits of synthetic benchmarks in a gaming environment.

what type of feedback is that exactly?

 

When the discussion is about a site's bias and the mods/staff from that site are ignoring the one question that is directly showing their bias how am I expected to react?

If you don't want to answer the question or have no answer to the question that's fine, but I wish you would have said that earlier so I wouldn't have to keep bringing it up.

 

Nvnews WAS very biased for years, only recently has it turned into a respectable and more balanced site. Due to some staffing changes, due to some people waking up and smelling the coffee, and membership.
Still there is many things that piss me off about Nvnews...there is no need for fan sites anymore.

Being a fan of hardware in general will get you more respect. I've been following Nvnews for 3 years...the mentality of the membership there has changed ALOT for the better.

 

I see, well that negates any "special interest" innuendo in my book so you won't hear it from me.

 

Well dang it to heck Digi I thought I clearly did by deferring to MikeC right away. C'mon now, don't frown like that...you use more muscles that way.

 

Sigh. Dig. Of course you think it's some grand NVIDIA conspiracy--it's not. Is it NVN bias? No. Is it a result of stupid politics between sites that we have no control over and that have a negative impact on us? Yes. Most definitely. One event in particular (that had NOTHING to do with NV News to begin with but one where we were drawn in for bullshit reasons) was the cause of the decision not to publish the reviews, and I'm going to leave it at that.

And NVN isn't really a fan site anymore. It's a site that is focused on NVIDIA cards in particular because that's what all of us used for years and it's what we know best.

 

That's because most games aren't extensively using shaders. The ones that are, show a performance gap.

This is not what Carmack has said at all. What he said was that using the NV30 path, the NV35 was on par with the 9800 Pro in shader performance. However, using the ARB2 path, the 9800 Pro was about twice as fast in shader performance.

Upcoming games that no one has seen, right? How do we even know that shading is the bottleneck?

So you're saying the NV35 is slower, but it doesn't matter because games will be hand-tuned or the driver will do shader replacement? I think this is wrong. Any game that is not hand-tuned will be slower, period. See Shadermark. If your favorite game is not one of these top-tier games, then you won't get the artificially inflated results other games have and you're going to be unhappy with an NV3x.

-FUDie

 

So why do you suppose that Valve stood up and said they spent five times as much time putting in TLC optimisations and still couldn't get reasonable performance on one of the most anticipated and technically advanced games of the last few years? If Nvidia couldn't improve things on that game, how are they going to improve things on anything else that uses any of the significant "cinematic computing" or next-gen features that Nvidia have been selling?

My personal opinion is that Valve were not willing to compromise their visuals to the extent necessary to get NV3x performing in a reasonable fashion. This appears to be the only way for NV3x to overcome the performance deltas that have been predicted by the various benchmarks (both gaming and synthetic) that we have seen.

TLC and lots of hassle and workarounds from the developers is not enough to fix the problem.