3DMark/NVIDIA/ExtremeTech & Cheating

[Force Flow]

I am sure that many of you computer hardware enthusiasts recall last year when ExtremeTech broke the story about NVIDIA cheating in 3DMark03 by "tweaking" their drivers in order to get a better score. After that we saw NVIDIA stop its funding Futuremark (the makers of 3DMark). That move always seemed a bit "cheesy" to me, especially when NVIDIA were the ones simply getting their hand caught in the cookie jar. This afternoon some of the reasoning behind that became a little clearer. Tero Sarkkinen, Executive VP of Sales and Marketing at Futuremark, explained to me that Futuremark in fact discovered the NVIDIA cheats being employed in 3DMark03 and turned all of that information over to Extremetech for verification and publication. Extremetech is a member of the Futuremark’s Benchmark Development Program as well as Beyond3D. Obviously NVIDIA would not keep giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to a benchmark company for cooperation if they were going to be "thrown under the bus" by the company they are giving “sponsorship” money to. It is my bet that NVIDIA knew about the leak from Futuremark to Extremetech even though we did not. Since then, NVIDIA is of course back on the 3DMark sponsorship bandwagon giving Futuremark huge sums of money along with ATI and others. Should Futuremark have taken this information to NVIDIA? Did they and get told to quash it? There is a lot more to this story that would make for good Net drama, but really I have grown somewhat tired of all of it. But it really did get me thinking again about where we are in terms of 3D gaming hardware. All of this was spawned by a conversation with Tero explaining to us the value of 3DMark05 that is soon to be released. I still see past 3DMark benchmarks as being more harmful to the industry than good and quite frankly today's conversations have got me thinking that a up-to-date editorial is in line to cover all that has gone on since last year. There have certainly been some major changes in the industry that are worth discussion. Some of them are good, some are bad, and some I just don’t know what to think of quite yet. But one thing about this year compared to the last, it has been about hardware, and not the company ethics behind the hardware. That is something we can all be thankful for.

~From HardOCP.com

[Spartan]

Interesting read. All I can really say is "follow the money". Makes me wonder how honest 3DMark05 will be.

-Spartan