Radeon deceiving us?

[Prew]

Check this article out:
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardwa...ck/default.asp

Radeon appears to be trying to deceive gamers and reviewers by secretly manipulating benchmark scores in Quake III. The Radeon drivers apparently override Quake III in-game visual quality settings in order to increase the framerate scores. So even though you might have QIII set to highest quality, the Radeon drivers change the settings (without you knowing it) to a lower visual quality thereby giving the Radeon card an unfair advantage when comparing its framerates to other videos cards. I'd say that this kinda sucks.

[rios__]

Yeah I read it too. It wouldn't be so bad if they had put it as an option or if they had informed people what it was doing. I consider what they did cheating.
I can see why they did though. The competition is fierce and Nvidia has genuises woking for them and ATI can't compare to the performance of a GF3 Ti500 (which ATI was aiming to dethrone).
Anyway, I'd still buy one (if they were a bit cheaper). I hope that ATI can fix it's driver performance so it can compete with Nvidia without having to resort to such tactics.

[Lord Prism]

Wow, that's pretty shocking reading.

[Xayd]

ATI has been historically known for poor driver support, especially in Win2k.

ATI tries to lie within the driver itself rather than deal with performance issues.

Xayd will no longer recommend any Radeon card to anyone .

[HAL9000]

Yea, knock ATI, like no other manufacturer has ever biased a test result. Back when Cyrix was in the game, I always enjoyed the magazine ads, one would show and Intel beating a Cyrix and an AMD, the next an AMD beating a Cyrix and an Intel, finally, the Cyrix ad showing that it beats an Intel and an AMD. Does everyone honestly believe that Nvidia has never produced a biased set of results? According to S3, they made some pretty awesome chips too.

OK, ATI is a bit slow on the drivers, but for myself, a new release has usually cured most, if not all of the issues while others have cured some and created others.

[morriswindgate]

The major thing about grapics cards, also sound cards, is personal taste. I for one like the ATI Graphics over the NVidia, just like I think that the Turtle Beach cards produce better sound than the Sound Blasters.
Benchmarks are really meaningless when looking at the average computer and for the most part are not what you want to base a decision to purchase on.

[Xayd]

I agree that ATI cards do have superior image quality, but image quality isn't the only thing anymore. Hardware is an advantage I like to have in games.

I play UT competitively (no it's not professional sports), but competitively nonetheless. This ATI driver is the equivalent to a guy selling broken hockey sticks to the guys who play in the local rink league, after demo'ing one for them that wasn't broken.

If I get 30 or 40 less frames per sec because a review was inaccurate, I'm out 200 bucks and still have to buy another vid card. I'd be pissed at the guy who wrote the review as well as the guy who rigged the card or its drivers. I know alot of sources for bad reviews, and I don't have to trust them. I know full well anything said on the MadOnion boards is crap, since their bias is well documented. I also know that MaximumPC sold out honesty in exchange for ad dollars from Intel and Dell, so I don't have to read their reviews either. This driver is *INTENTIONALLY* misleading to hardware sites that benchmark these cards with Q3A.

[Prew]

The ATI Radeon 8500 is being sold for $194 (newegg.com- OEM card which is slightly slower than the retail version)- which means that it is much cheaper than the Geforce 3's and Geforce3 TI 500 it was originally meant to compete with. So pricewise, it is acutally competing with the Geforce3 TI 200 or Geforce 2 ultra's. At this price, it might acutally be worth considering given that the card is more than competitive with these other cards. But there is still that ethical concern that really bothers me.

[DrZaius]

ATi is just showing us what we want to see. They've realized that most gamers read reviews and immediately just forward to the benchmarks and look at the highest bar in Q3A results. By only judging cards on their performance in Q3A we have created the "Q3 FPS myth" very similar to the "MHz myth" with AMD, and just as AMD has resorted to their PR system, ATi has "optimized" their drivers for Q3A. Has it hurt anyone? No. Will it stop me from buying/recommending ATi? No.

[Prew]

Nope, hasn't hurt anybody-- but I think the issue is they optimized the drivers by overriding the in-gaming settings- and they did it with the intent of deceiving reviewers and the readers of the reviews. If a reviewer is comparing 32-bit performance in video cards but one of the cards secretly changes the in-game setting to 16-bit and secretly lowers the resolution(which is what the ATI drivers do)then the deceived buyer is making a decision based on faulty information. If you buy a car that's advertised as 255 hp but it is really only 200 hp- and you were deliberately deceived by the manufacturer-- wouldn't you be upset- or would you just say "I wasn't hurt by it, so its no big deal"?