Dear god
Dear god
As my friend who linked me this said 'If you want a speed boost on an FX just rename any game you have to 3dmark03.exe.
This now calls into question two things... the FXs performance at AA across the board, which if looked really good at, and specifically the doom 3 AA performance, which was suspect in the first place. Didn't it go *up* with AA on on the nvidia cards in one set of benchmarks I saw? Don't take my word for it until someone remembers where and produces a link. My brain could just have messed up.
As I said in a thread a while back... this isn't over... but f**k even i didn't expect that they were *still* cheating/optimising on 2003.
The iq of the two, well the 3d mark iq is below 3d mark, specifically on the set of drawers, but it still isn't terrible. Why isn't that quality a setting in their drivers that you can choose yourself? Oh yeah because they want to inflate their AA scores. Silly me.
What makes me hesitant on this whole thing is two fold. Memories of Quack... which may or may not have been a cheat, that they fixed IQ without damaging performances suggests not, but when someone like Humus has a different opinion, well I respect his work and believe he knows what he's talking about. ATi may have been cheating, may not have been, but they got dragged through the mud face first over it all. I'm worried that we'll be taken back there.
And then, we have the uncomfortable fact this came from ATi. Remember where Quack came from? Not Hard OCP as Tech Report say, but NVidia as Tom at Tom's Hardware revealed to everyone. But Kyle didn't name his source, took all the credit and NVidia of course didn't mind either.
However you look at this fanATIc or not, the fact it came from ATI brings it into more questioning than if anyone else had found it since they have a vested interest in it. I think it's time to start renaming all our benchmarking programs to see if it makes any difference. In scores and in IQ.
I wouldn't take the Tech Report article as anything more than a 'strange quirk' right now since there could be more going on, but my feelings are that, it's more of the same crap Nvidia have been pulling of late.
That this comes out after the so called 'truce' really is going to hurt, and even worse, is the exact same thing they called ATI out on over Quack, saying then that they'd never do the same thing themselves. And now, even though they're still making a lot more money than ATI, they're cheating to stop ATI gaining more ground on them.
ATI haven't overtaken them in sales yet. Just performance... but I guess NVidia see where that could go.
My final comment?
BIG props to Tech Report for stating their source was ATI. That's what Kyle *should* have done with Quack. Nice to see some people doing things the *right* way.
Foxy