Wheee!! [H] has finally managed to piss off FutureMark.

[K.I.L.E.R]

"You're, you're getting really baffled here. Piece-of-Shit! Now walk away. That's all it is, it's nothing more! Free yourself folks, if you see it, Piece-of-Shit, say it and walk away. You're right! You're right! Not those fuckers who want to tell you how to think! You're fucking right!"

That's from the alimighty Bill Hicks. I don't think anything better could be said.

Go Bill!

Thanks. I didn't know you're a fan of me.

Doesn't freedom of speech apply on the FM issue?

 

[FrgMstr]

Thanks. I didn't know you're a fan of me.

Doesn't freedom of speech apply on the FM issue?

I think it pretty much applies to anything you want to talk about...

 

[thop]

Oh boy now FM inflated Kyle's already huge ego even more.

As for it inflating my ego even beyond the huge proportions that it is already at, that is not true.

Well let me put it this way, you certainly seem to have troubles to let go sometimes. I wonder how many opportunities you didn't let pass to diss the parhelia, just an example. And i guess we haven't heard the last time about FM either

Anyway what i'm trying to say is that i see a certain gap between the professionality in your recent reviews and your comments in general (like that doggy barking up the wrong tree thing).

 

[FrgMstr]

Oh boy now FM inflated Kyle's already huge ego even more.

As for it inflating my ego even beyond the huge proportions that it is already at, that is not true.

Well let me put it this way, you certainly seem to have troubles to let go sometimes. I wonder how many opportunities you didn't let pass to diss the parhelia, just an example. And i guess we haven't heard the last time about FM either

Anyway what i'm trying to say is that i see a certain gap between the professionality in your recent reviews and your comments in general (like that doggy barking up the wrong tree thing).

Well in my opinion we have always dished out the news with opinions since I have been doing this. So I see no change there. As for problems with our reviews, please point them out as we are always trying to make things better.

 

[thop]

As for problems with our reviews, please point them out as we are always trying to make things better.

I guess what i said didn't come out right, what i meant with gap is that recent reviews (like the D3HG) are very good ... and some other comments are not as good

 

[Doomtrooper]

Fire the rich boss that got rich by using the same tatics as Jerry Springer (shock TV/shock internet) would be the 1st choice.

You would be surprised at how much money Anand and Kyle make off these sites, and it is the people that make the hits that put money in their pockets... PR people that work at IHVs base their review cards on site popularity vs. good technical reviews !

Really looking forward to the next generation console, no more of this biased journalism.

 

[Geo]

This is not the time to be threatening laughable lawsuits against [H]. Kyle is probably feeling pretty cocky on that front right now. Hopefully that won't lead him into pushing someone into a lawsuit that *isn't* laughable.

But this one ain't it.

This is pretty far from a laughable lawsuit.

3dmark can prove its value and its accuracy.. and they can *easily* demostrate that Kyle has defamed them and with specific cases of innacurate information.

Familiar with New York Times vs Sullivan? The standard is pretty high.

 

[Reverend]

Damn Tero... now all my popcorn will have to be trashed...

 

[Inane_Dork]

Would there have been a lawsuit if nothing had been made public? Of course, this is conjecture, but I wonder what the point of posting the emails was in the first place.

 

[FrgMstr]

Would there have been a lawsuit if nothing had been made public? Of course, this is conjecture, but I wonder what the point of posting the emails was in the first place.

No telling about that.

I certainly feel as though if a company wants to take us into the public arena of civil court, we can discuss it out in the open. Tero was talking to a "reporter" or "journalist" or what ever insulting name following posters want to assign it. He had no expectation of privacy, nor did he ever request one. I feel if a company is big enough to get the lawyers out and attack us, they are big enough to shoulder the heat of the community they are in the middle of.

 

[Killer-Kris]

...
Please don't make an idiotic statement saying "Far Cry sucks because it doesn't specifically tell me how my box will run Doom 3," because unlike 3DMark, FarCry will tell you how well FarCry runs on that particular hardware and Doom3 will tell you how well Doom3 runs. What does 3DMark tell you about games?

3dMk is what? Is it a benchmark designed to tell you how every game will run on your system, or is it a "gamer's benchmark" designed to provide you with information as to how your current hardware is likely to perform in software gaming situations which use the latest in API feature support, support that might be months or even a year or more away from actually being implemented in shipping 3d games?

Well I have a hard time believing that we need a benchmark to tell us that our current hardware is going to perform terribly in future gaming situations. But I suppose that is just a minor nitpick. What I believe Kyle, and most of those who oppose the use of 3DMark as a benchmark to compare cards game performance is that it is not a game of any sort. Doom3, FarCry, etc... are all games, people actually will and do play, their engines will be used in future games, their engines compute more than just pretty graphics.

Yes, 3DMark gives us a glimps into the future and will give us an idea of how particular cards may perform using particular algorithms. This sort of analysis IMHO has no place in a gaming orientated sight, where as IMHO it absolutely should be in a technical board review/comparison at a sight such as B3D.

Of course, the correct answer is the latter, imo. The API functionality 3dMk supports is both real and current--the implementation of that API feature support in shipping games is likely to be much later in coming, however. Does the fact that a benchmark supports current API functionality that won't be seen in shipping games for months, but will indeed be seen in them eventually because its already in the API, somehow invalidate 3dMK as a benchmark?

It all depends on how that benchmark is being used. The information that 3DMark supplies needs to be carefully analysed and used. Yes, 3DMark03 showed us that the R300 exceled at PS2.0, and NV30 floundered. Yes, it showed us that NV30 had a very poweful stencil fillrate. What did that tell us about future games and how our hardware will run them? Well seeing as we still haven't seen a whole plethora of games that use PS2.0 very heavily, and like wise there haven't been a whole ton of games that use alot of stencil power either. Sure we do have exceptions like FarCry, D3, etc... but the vast majority of games released in the last year or two (and probably into the next year or so) still hardly make heavy enough usage of these features to show a large enough difference between the two cards. Especially so long as everyone keeps targeting the most popular graphics card in history, the GeforceMx series.

Understand that I didn't say, "3dMK sucks because it tells me nothing specifically about how Doom 3 runs on my box," but [H] said it, and I was merely illustrating what a ridiculous, inappropriate statement that is. It's exactly as ridiculous as saying, "Far Cry sucks because it tell me nothing specific as to how my box will run Doom 3."

While Kyle didn't state it in necesarily the best manor, what he was likely meaning was that no one plays 3DMark, it's not a game and it should not play a very large role in determining whether a piece of hardware plays a game well or not.

No benchmark of any type, be it a cpu bench, a hard drive bench, a hard-drive controller bench, a ram bus bench, ad infinitum, wil ever, under any circumstances, tell you how your box will run any specific 3d game.

And that is why you probably should not see those sort of benches in a review geared towards gamers. And sights like [H] tend to reserve those for it's CPU, Motherboard, etc... reviews. And in which case they should even then stay away from synthetic benchmarks if they are trying to show real world differences/improvements.

Therefore, if that is a valid reason for tossing out 3dMk, then all other benchmarks are also meaningless and worthless for the same reason.

Well with that very same reasoning you're telling me that if I were reviewing a CPU I should run a benchmark that shows MIPs and/or MFLOPs? Those tests will give me a great deal of insite into the internal structure of the CPU, but will tell me nothing of value about most real world programs.

Ideally the best way to benchmark is to use the program you are interested in the performance of and run a "relatively" small relevant data set through it. And with that, we're brought back to the fact that 3DMark is not a game anyone plays.

But it's easy as pi to illustrate what's wrong with that notion, because none of these benchmarks, including 3dMK, is designed for the express purpose of informing the user as to how any specific game will run on his system. Instead, these benchmarks, including 3dMk, are designed to provide other information about the tested hardware which is both general and generic in nature. That, of course, is the difference between a "benchmark" and a "game."

So you agree that it has no place in reviews like the ones [H] does since they focus on games? And it is anything but a "Gamer's Benchmark"? Remember games have AI, physics, sound, pathfinding, networking, etc... all factors that greatly influence performance. 3DMark is hardly a "gamer's benchmark" since it lacks most everything that makes up a game. ALL it has is graphics.

Now these bottlenecks change with time, and are probably fairly hard to predict because each team is going to have their own priorities. As far as I know, the latest 3DMark completely ignores physics, AI, sound, etc. All things most every game has, in order to even work. This greatly limits the scope of how you can use 3DMark, So once again I say that it is just about useless and quite out of place for a sight like HardOCP, who's focus is on games.

Now with that said, that's not to mean that 3DMark isn't with out it's uses. I for one believe that 3DMark is and will forever be infinitely invaluable to sites like B3D because it gives you a peak into a possible future, and shows hardware strengths/weaknesses that we would otherwise never see. It allows you to in a controlled environment to change settings variable by variable in order to isolate particular behavior and is just an all around excellent tool for that sort of work.

Good observation, which of course undermines everything else you said previously, but duplicity of thought seems to be an abiding characteristic surrounding this topic... Yes, 3dMK is a benchmark, not a game, and should be used and thought of only in that capacity.

I don't see how I've undermined anything? It has no place in a suite of benchmarks that target games, and gamers. It belongs, very much so in the suite of benchmarks that target technical aspects, algorithms, and stuff of that nature. These are two VERY different target groups with VERY different needs and uses.

I'm not aware of FutureMark ever representing it differently.

"Gamer's Benchmark"? It seems like they're misrepresenting themselves since it lacks everything that makes up a game other than graphics.

Let's call a spade a spade, shall we? Prior to nVidia's "War on 3dMk"...

Now that's something I don't care to much about nor do I want to go into.

All I'll say on that particular topic is that yes, Kyle does seem to have obsessed beyond the point of healthiness. Though the direction Kyle has been sending [H]'s reviews in, 3DMark has very little value to them. Of course by that same token [H]'s reviews have very little value to me either because they don't benchmark any games that I play (read that as they need to expand their test suite to be MUCH MUCH broader).

 

[FrgMstr]

Of course by that same token [H]'s reviews have very little value to me either because they don't benchmark any games that I play (read that as they need to expand their test suite to be MUCH MUCH broader).

What games would you like to see? We use monthly game sales numbers to help pick what we are using....but we sort of wing it too if we think the game/engine will have more value than just one title.

 

[Killer-Kris]

Of course by that same token [H]'s reviews have very little value to me either because they don't benchmark any games that I play (read that as they need to expand their test suite to be MUCH MUCH broader).

What games would you like to see? We use monthly game sales numbers to help pick what we are using....but we sort of wing it too if we think the game/engine will have more value than just one title.

I had always figured that was pretty much the reason why any games I play were never represented. I have a bit of a strange taste in games or so it would seem...

- Battlefield 1942 (original, DC, EoD, RtR)
- Black & White
- Deus Ex (1 & 2)
- America's Army
- Empire Earth (Really works the CPU)
- Homeworld (1 & 2)

and if/when I have money
- Joint Ops
- Lock on Modern Air Combat
- Thief Deadly Shadows

So as you can see other than BF1942, and AA most of my favored games are not exactly the most popular.

Also, I suppose the other problem is that most of those games don't have any built in benchmarking tools, at none that I know of.

 

[PatrickL]

Add MMORPG. It is very interesting for gamers to know if their graphic cards will run with game like WoW, EQ2 and so on.

 

[FrgMstr]

I had always figured that was pretty much the reason why any games I play were never represented. I have a bit of a strange taste in games or so it would seem...

- Battlefield 1942 (original, DC, EoD, RtR)
- Black & White
- Deus Ex (1 & 2)
- America's Army
- Empire Earth (Really works the CPU)
- Homeworld (1 & 2)

and if/when I have money
- Joint Ops
- Lock on Modern Air Combat
- Thief Deadly Shadows

The lack of tools really means nothing to us anymore for the most part. Lemme run down your list though.

BF1942 was dropped pretty much because all the hardware we were seeing was kicking ass in the game. Problems we saw were overly driver specific.

- Black & White - Old not played much
- Deus Ex (1 & 2) - Never really felt any readers asking for this one so we never paid it much attention.
- America's Army - Tons of folks useing this one for sure, but I thought it was not hardware bound. I am thinking wrong on this??????
- Empire Earth (Really works the CPU) Never heard of it.
- Homeworld (1 & 2) Never exposed to it.
- Joint Ops - Never Exposed to it. Used a couple of others in the past.
- Lock on Modern Air Combat - Looked at it, decided on MS Flight Sim due to huge sales.
- Thief Deadly Shadows[/quote] - Have not looked at it.

You might bring this up with Brent as well. He has a LOT of input when it comes to what games to test with. It is his duty to go out and buy them and play them.

 

[FrgMstr]

Add MMORPG. It is very interesting for gamers to know if their graphic cards will run with game like WoW, EQ2 and so on.

EQ2 is certainly going to be looked at for sure. Currnetly we run City of Heroes for our MMORPG. Sales and subs on it have been pretty heated.

 

[PatrickL]

I am on both EQ2 beta and World of Warcraft beta; EQ2 is very hard on the system ressources if try tu play with max settings. I ll play WoW at release because of the gameplay but as always it is a matter of personnal chice

 

[FrgMstr]

I am on both EQ2 beta and World of Warcraft beta; EQ2 is very hard on the system ressources if try tu play with max settings. I ll play WoW at release because of the gameplay but as always it is a matter of personnal chice

System specs? What settings? Don't have to be superdetailed, just some ballpark ideas please.

 

[ChrisRay]

World of Warcraft beta has performed pretty well on my system. And I dont have a really high end computer. I expect that game to perform very on all hardware judging by my early impressions.

 

[K.I.L.E.R]

Kyle, why not review Final Fantasy 5 on the SNES?