Tired of the 3Dmark Cheats? But you should read this anyway. Unwinder posts his findings at Digit-Life

[merlocka]

Take a look here.

I know this subject has been beat dead about a thousand times, but this article is fairly important.

Unwinder has discovered significant application detection mechanisms in both ATI and nVidia drivers which change the IQ to improve benchmark results in 3dMark2001.

This is mainly verification of what most everyone already suspected, but I think it's a pretty substatial document none the less.

 

[MercenaryForHire]

The next person to repost this damned story will have their face eaten by myself.

- M4H

 

[spam]

Interesting stuff! Here is another, dated June 30th http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/ut2003perf/default.asp

 

[Rand]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
The next person to repost this damned story will have their face eaten by myself.

- M4H

Face eaten?
That's an.... interesting way of phrasing it.

 

[Harabecw]

I can't believe people still care about the 3dmark "conspiracy"
It got sooo uninteresting after all the threads about it

What IS interesting is that until that, no one questioned sites' use of a given set of demos which are prone to optimization, and not self-made ones.

 

[merlocka]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire
The next person to repost this damned story will have their face eaten by myself.

- M4H

Did you read the article or just trying to be clever? Are you aware of Unwinders work on the Antidetector utility? I know some details have already been posted in Russian but many people have been awaiting the english version of his testing.

My opinion is that the Anitdetector utility is going to proffer some interesting details on real application "optimizations" which are present in the latest drivers from nVidia and ATI (and not just 3Dmark rubbish which I agree is beyond spent). Some of which is already being discussed here.

 

[Rand]

Interesting, the GF FX seems to forcefully disable all trilinear filtering regardless of driver/in-game detail settings... quite disappointing.

I really wish nVidia would quit the rampant 'optimizations', most of their boards are good enough to stand on their own without relying on slightly underhanded tactics.

I'm glad ATi has chosen not to follow in nVidia's path in this regard, even if they arent wholly free of blame themselves.

 

[stardust]

Originally posted by: Rand
Interesting, the GF FX seems to forcefully disable all trilinear filtering regardless of driver/in-game detail settings... quite disappointing.

I really wish nVidia would quit the rampant 'optimizations', most of their boards are good enough to stand on their own without relying on slightly underhanded tactics.

I'm glad ATi has chosen not to follow in nVidia's path in this regard, even if they arent wholly free of blame themselves.

From the Link:

It reminds me "of" the picture I saw above when analyzed optimizations of the NVIDIA's drivers. It's obvious that ATI also pulls up the results at the expense of the alternative rendering of leaves and grass, i.e. at the expense of the objects the scene is full of and which are a bottleneck of this test. But the character of the difference is unlike to NVIDIA's case. It seems that the optimizations take place during polygon texturing, not at the stage of transformation and lighting. Since the difference is most noticeable on the leaves' edges we can affirm that the driver detects the Nature scene and then replaces the texture format of the leaves and grass with a more advantageous one (in order to save on the bit capacity of the alpha channel) by forced compression of an uncompressed transparent texture or by repacking DXT3 textures into the DXT1 format.

unless those aren't "optimizations" your absolutely right
btw, there are paths in cheating now?

texturing also takes alot of processor time and according to the quote, ATi also replaces textures. (By that photoshop rendition, i think ATi has replaced more "stuff" in their optimizations because the antidetection image actually shows texturing that look like trees.

neways, no intention of offending anyone..only recently have i been bored enough to read about this and discovered that ATi isn't as angelic as it's been given credit for.