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

Well for your sake kyle I really hope somebody doesn't decide to take a misslikeing to the way they are treated on your site and get really serious about it. Sometimes things like that bench sucks really are kind of mean spirrited.

3dmark may or may not have it's issues. I dont really care either way but I dont go arround slamming them or you. If you do go arround saying thta sucks and have the traffic that you do it doesn't mean you are right it just means allot of people goto your site. That also has a tendency to make you more responsible for your actions.

 

Sorry, but I cannot resist this....

Gee, you know, if you didn't go out of your way to antagonize selected people and companies by using your web site pages as a barbed strap which you childishlessly and foolishly believe you can wield across their backs in order to whip them into subserviance--you might not ever have to go to court to "stand by" what you say.... But I guess that's a completely novel concept for you, right?.... Look around and you'll be amazed at the millions of public words printed each day which do not put their authors in "court."

Or, it may be that you are actually saying that you prefer to "stand by your words in court" as you believe that's the only venue by which you can draw public attention to the words you wish to "stand by"....is that it?

You hope, of course... You will also be impoverished by the lawyer's fees you have to pay, win or lose, so can I take it money is something which you also view with contempt? Or is it that you hope to defray such legal expenditures as you may bring down upon yourself by soliciting PayPal donations through [H]--is that it?.... All I can say is that I'm glad it's your money the lawyers are gobbling up and not mine, as you've certainly granted them the "freedom of [H]'s pocketbook" in the last few months...

OK, so why does [H] persist in antagonizing certain carefully selected people and companies with baseless slander, then? What is the statement, "3dMk sucks," if not baseless, unprofessional, discourteous ridicule? Certainly, it's not a technical statement is it? So if it's not this kind of silly rhetoric that gives you what you imagine to be your "reader base" (a base which also reads everything else on the 'net, never forget, and belongs to everyone else as much as to [H]), then why do you keep doing it? Obviously, you've just admitted it does nothing to attract readers to [H], so what's the point?

Uh-oh, it's the imperial "we" and "our" again. Come on, quit cowering behind the non-existent "we"--you aren't Louis XVI and this isn't medieval France.... It's only *you* making this post, correct? Heh, "we", indeed.... (I'll take it on faith that when you say "we" you don't mean to suggest that you are hearing voices.)

But...since you think he's making baseless claims right now, then what's your excuse? (Saying "we can prove it," is no substitute for actually proving anything, btw.)

Better edited for sanity, with all of the fictitious "we's" and "I will be victorious" gladiator-fantasy remarks.

Seriously, Kyle, why do you delight in dropping your drawers and presenting your bum to the world just so that people can stick sharp pins in it? You seem to derive a lot of pleasure from it as you do it so often. What I don't think you appreciate is that if you keep up your present course of nonsense and childish provocation then eventually even in court the only person who will care about the words you "stand by" will be you. There won't be any "we" to speak of, at least literally...

Here's hoping you can find some other avenue by which you will seek to engage your readership instead of to thrash it.

 

But Walt, what fun is it if'n you can't go around using your website as a barbed strap?


(I think I'm only half-joking.... )

 

Well, some people also enjoy getting pins stuck in their bums, but I'm just not one one of them...

(Completely serious.)

 

I betcha you'd laugh if I poked ya, I'm real gentle.

 

OK, but the central fallacy of [H]'s public posture that "it ought not be sued" for whatever it writes is that being sued for what you write, and having the government forbid you from writing something you choose to write , are two entirely different matters.

In the [H]-IL matter, for instance, the public posture of [H] is that its "freedom of speech" rights under the Constitution are abrogated by the fact that IL has sued it for libel. Of course, this is not even remotely the case for the following reasons:

(1) At no time did any entity (government, civil, or commercial) intervene and order [H] not to write what it chose to write. In fact, there was never any requirement for [H] to have its articles screened in advance by any entity, so that [H] was forced to secure publication permission from any entity to write what it chose, so as a matter of practical reciprocity it is literally impossible for [H] to prove in any court in the US that its Constitutional right to free speech was ever infringed, since no entity ever infringed it. (Of course, this is merely [H]'s public posture concerning these events--and certainly not its "legal" posture......I hope, for [H]'s sake...)

(2) Libel lawsuits are neither unConstitutional nor illegal in any state of the Union, and suing a public press entity for libel has never been considered related to Constitutional free speech rights in any capacity whatever, and has never been legally construed as a violation of the Constitutional right of free speech in any court at any time. Bringing a libel suit is quite above board.

The fact is that any entity may publicly write anything it chooses at any time, without any requirement for pre-screening and without censorship, whether it is true or not. (Except for threats of violence, fraud, and other forms of illegal speech.) In fact, this is precisely what [H] did with its original IL "story." Now, If a party feels aggrieved and damaged by the publication, however, and believes the information printed is false and/or defamatory, it may *electively* choose to bring a libel suit to press its case at its own expense through civil court. This is what IL eventually did after its invitation to [H] to retract was rebuffed, and after [H] "preemptively" sued IL in a Texas court over matters not related at all to the eventual libel suit IL filed in Federal court.

So the truth is that at no time has [H]'s right to free speech been abrogated by any entity, and the truth is that [H] won't be the first publication sued for libel nor will it be the last, as such suits do not involve abrogation of free speech rights. In reality, what [H] is arguing for *in public* is the "right not to be sued for libel," which does not exist in the Constitution and therefore is not protected (I'm positive that [H]'s public posture and its actual legal posture in court are entirely unrelated.)

So since [H]'s public posture concerns a legally non-existent claim of "freedom of speech", as opposed to the actual issues at hand of whether [H] libeled IL or not, which will be decided in the Federal Court suit unless the parties settle, my position is simply that [H] talking publicly about its own "freedom of speech" rights while simultaneously denying it to the very people who inhabit the [H] forums is, while certainly not illegal, probably one of the most [H]ypocritical public positions I've seen in quite some time. (Pun intended...)

IE, I'm not disputing [H]'s legal right to moderate its forums as restrictively as it may choose, just as there is no doubt that being sued for libel is not an abrogation of the Constitutional right of free speech--I'm just pointing out the rank hypocrisy of it all...

 

Heh-Heh... Not really interested, old boy...

 

We still stand behind what we say, whether you like the delivery or not. Sorry if you don't. You are not forced to read it. But I do appreciate all the attention you guys help generate in situations like this. We certainly seem to find many more folks that share our line of thinking.

 

Frankly, Kyle, it's more a line of non-thinking, IMO, so I wouldn't be too surprised if most gamers flock to it. You choose to ignore synthetics mainly b/c it's harder to interpret their results vis-a-vis upcoming games than it is to do some time-intensive FRAPS runs. Obviously, if I want to know how D3 or FC or HL2 will perform, I'd want to benchmark the games themselves. But what if they're not due to be released for months, but I need/want a new video card now? I'd prefer to buy with at least an idea of future performance.

Sure, you say you dislike synthetics b/c it takes away from IHVs optimizing for real games. I say bollocks. Publicly traded companies will find a way to twist things to their benefit one way or another, and removing synthetics doesn't limit their options to solely ones that'll benefit gamers.

(FYI, lest you think I'm wholly against you, I agree that Tero's outburst was uncalled for, *especially* from a PR POV. I'm glad he's publically acknowledged his mistake. I'm also glad you're winning against Infinium's equally ill-conceived, yet actually filed, lawsuit. And I think your graphs should become standard reviewer fare. We need to start seeing more low [or at least bottom 5%, to avoid overemphasizing outliers] fps numbers in addition to the potentially misleading avg ones.)

Edit: Yes, I'd imagine most people buying GeForces and Radeons will be playing games with them.

 

Yes, we are catering to people that want to play games with their video cards.

 

WaltC, after reading your last post in reply to me I've come to the conclusion that we're both right. Or at least so it would seem since I can only think that we're discussing totally different aspects of this topic.

The point which I was trying to get across (and apparently not very well at that) was one of the basic principles of public writing/speaking: Tailor your work to your audience. That includes taking into account their knowledge level, their expectations, their interests, as well as several other factors.

To illustrate this we'll use two different groups:
Group 1.) Regular to Hardcore game players
Group 2.) Regular Game Players who are interested in technology for the sake of learning.

I would imagine that these two groups may be a fairly accurate representation of people that would read [H]s reviews (Group1), and those who regularly read B3Ds reviews (Group2).

The individuals in group1 likely do not care about the difference between stencil shadows, and shadow maps and the algorithms behind implementing them. Nor do they care that NV30 was a 4x2 architecture while the R300 was an 8x1. What they most likely wanted to know was how do these new cards perform in their favorite games.

The individuals in group2 likely do want to know about the different algorithms and how they're implemented. They also likely want to know why card A performs like it does and why card B performs differently. They likely want to know the different strengths and weaknesses of the cards.

So in this scenario, group 1 would gain very little if anything at all from the use of a synthetic test like 3DMark. It is not representative of their interests, the information it provides is not what they want to know, and the technical information it provides is likely to be beyond their grasp with out a great deal of explanation (which would be time and space otherwise used to talk about the details and results of the benchmarks that are important to this group).

The flip side of this coin is that group 2 will likely have a very broad range of preexisting knowledge so to what level the author wants to write to may vary. But for a technical review, synthetics do a wonderful job of helping to illustrate particular behavior from the tested games. This panders to the expectations and interests of this group.

Of course groups that I've chosen are what I view to be polar opposites, the "How do cards A vrs B perform in their intended tasks?" and "Why do cards A and B perform like they do in their intended tasks?" or possibly even "How do cards A and B perform the intended tasks?"

I never intended to claim that 3DMark was absolutely worthless as a benchmark, only that [H] seems to have decided to take the group 1 approach and as such I agree with Kyle's decision to look down on synthetics for his readers. While at the same time I would be extremely upset and disappointed if B3D made these very same decisions. B3D does an excellent job of getting into the nitty gritty details and I couldn't imagine them having a very easy time of it with out synthetic tests. Then of course there are all the infinite combinations of the two approaches, as well as probably even a few approaches/reader groups I haven't even thought of.

 

Tailoring your reviews to category one gamers doesn't necessitate dissing synthetics. Kyle could just avoid them b/c they don't serve his readers' purposes, rather than denigrate them for questionable reasons. I appreciate [H]'s emphasis on chronological framerates and screenshot analysis--it's one I hope all serious reviews would incorporate. But I don't need to denigrate synthetics just b/c they don't serve my immediate purposes.

Kyle, have you considered that nV produced such a superb DX9 GPU in the NV40 in part b/c of their embarassing performance in 3DM03, that 3DM03's early results lit a fire under nV's butts to make a no-compromise DX9 part?

 

Well as a gamer I found 3DMark01 to blow my freaking mind when it came out. 3DMark01 has been most useful to many gamers. At that time with almost every game based on the Quake 3 or Unreal engine that didn't show off any of the DX7 or DX8 graphic cards features, 3DMark gave gamers an idea of what to expect in future games.

For example you could actually play with the car in the first game test. This showed gamers that it's a synthetic benchmark with a real working game in it.

The Lobby was an idea of what to expect from Max Payne. I heard that the Lobby test was actually using a preview of the Max Payne engine. This is not a surprise since Futuremark is the sister company to Remedy and Max Payne.

After 3DMark03 came out and with Nvidia cheating, gamers realized how many problems a synthetic benchmark can have.

The biggest expectation was Battle Of Proxycon since it looked just like Doom3. To gamers if Battle of Proxycon ran like crap so would Doom3. To even run that benchmark at a decent fps you needed at least a 9700 Pro. So thats when the big hardware upgrades started to occur and everyone needed a new graphics card. When Doom3 was released it really didn't need anything more than a Radeon 9600 or a FX 5600 for High Quality settings. Even if people went out and bought Geforce 6800s like there was no tomorrow.

Now 3DMark05 is released and it shows nothing that people haven't seen in Doom3 or FarCry. Most of the tests couldn't even break 25 fps on the $500 X800 Xt or 6800 Ultra cards.

Since ATI and Nvidia have been busy producing $500 video cards that almost nobody can afford, what does 3DMark05 tell the gamer when these cards don't even go past 25 fps?

Especially now since with the Doom3 engine we're gonna see games released using it's engine for the next 2 years from now. Maybe even FarCry's engine or Source engine.

A review site can go a head and include 3DMark05 benchmarks. I'll be skipping them and look at the game benchmarks. The benchmarks that matter for the gamer from a game.

For hardware review sites 3DMark05 maybe a great tool to find the weakness in graphic cards with the Fill rate tests and pixel shader tests. For the gamer it's worthless and the best thing I can probably use it for is to test my systems stability.

Just my view which is a gamers view.

 

So it seems that I'm floundering on making myself clear as of lately. I suppose I should have said that I agree with Kyle's decision to not use synthetics, but not in his behavior towards them. I agree he's been rude, and has gone quite overboard with all his comments. Though seeing as he has a fairly valid reason behind them I'd say being threatened with libel was awefully extreme as well.

 

Millions of uneducated readers I might add, getting false information from a unqualified journalist that is spoon fed information. I argued about this in your forum and proved you wrong so many times that I was banned by you for telling the truth. You also took the time to remove the threads that had your quotes in it, especially the little trip to to Nvidia just prior to the release of 3Dmark 03. You are not fooling anyone Kyle, I know how you operate to get hits. Your buddy at Nvidia that gave you the 'Quack' utility shows what kind of journalist you are, the 'Enquirer' of the internet, do anything for a scoop With comments like Nvidia had 3Dmark 03 for a week when they were a Beta member up until a month prior to the release date, and 3Dmark 03 found on Nvidias own FTP server really shows what BS you were trying to spread...that is a fact.

I always save your quotes to ensure they don't get deleted by your little delete finger. What was Nvidias thoughts Kyle, I bet I could copy and paste some of your reasoning right from some Nvidia PDF.

 

Publishing private e-mails might breach netiquette (and in some countries maybe even the law, but I seriously doubt that is the case in the US). It cant breach a NDA if the recipients doesnt enter into any agreement with you though.

"By reading this you agree to ..." licenses on e-mail? You'd get laughed out of court.

 

AH HAH! You're encouraging me to post emails from certain individuals that I get!!

 

I'm sure endlessly repeating that mantra brings you a lot of self-confidence but it does little to disguise the fragility of your "journalism." And your personality, I might add.

Sure. A little bit of forum fascism, mass bannings, thread deletions and abusive replies to critical emails is a great way to "find" people who share your line of thinking. North Korea style.

 

Sorry, I got your meaning. I just posted somewhat concurrently, and my post was directed at Kyle.

 

Sure DT....everyones uneducated in comparison to you. Please shine your brilliant light of programming/hardware knowledge on us, so that we may bask in your brilliance....

As far as Kyle/Brent being unqualified journalist's....they know a lot more about 3d/the industry than you do. You simply hide out here in your cave, waiting for someone to make an nVidia/[H] post, so you can lash out against them.

You couldnt even hold your job as a rage3d moderator for a couple of days before they stripped you of the title.

You were banned for arguing...that's for sure.
Whether or not you were telling the truth about anything, is anyones guess.
People had already started ignoring your post's a few weeks before your ban.

I'm sure Kyle is scared.

You're grasping at straws, and digging up old bones....I think you have a jealousy problem.

HOLY MOLY!.......talk about obsessions!

Doomtrooper...you're as translucent as a jellyfish, and IMHO, just as spineless.
I've watched you attack people with extreme malice and hatred, on multiple forums, for simply prefering one brand of computer hardware over the other.

You even threatened a member of staff here with physical violence....over a silly argument......You should feel real good about yourself.

I bet you beat your dog.