Warp nous apporta ses lumieres en ce 2007/10/29 19:16:
> Alain <ele### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
>> To get the real results, you need to use demos and benchmarks by independant
>> devlopers, and hope that your drivers don't have special codes that lowers the
>> settings like resolution, polygon count and colour depth, to artificialy make
>> the benchmark run faster. nVidia DID use that dirty trick, and there is no proof
>> that ATI used it or not at this time.
> 
>   You mean that nvidia deliberately put some code in their display driver
> that detected that you are running, for example, 3DMark, and if so it has
> a special code which converts the triangle meshes given by 3DMark to the
> driver to ones with less polygons so that the graphics card will appear
> to run faster than it really would?
> 
>   I suppose there's no way for a program to detect such trickery...
> 
What it does is reset the benchmark parameters to some lower ones when the 
actual benchmark starts, then set them back to the selected values on exit.
Result: you get a display that say that you used parameter set X, but the test 
was performed with parameters X/2.
Things that where done:
- changing the colour depth from 32 to 16 bits.
- changing the detail level from "High" to "Medium" or even "Low".
- turning fog off.
- reducing the Z-buffer depth.
- reducing the particles count.
- turning antialiasing off.
- reducing textures quality from "High" to "Medium", "Normal" or "Low".
- turning 3linear interpolation off.
- reduce the lights number.
...and some others...

You mention 3DMark, and it's exactly the first they targetted. They got caught. 
They got sued, and LOST. 3DMark coutered by using name randomization of the 
programm and all of it's components, folders and registry entries. Then every 
other benchmarks makers followed. Net result: nVidia's results droped, sometimes 
by an order of magnitude, around 10 to 30 times slower in some cases!
Think about boasting a 240+ FPS in a mark, then seeing that drop to around 12~17 
FPS after your hack got negated!

-- 
Alain
-------------------------------------------------
WARNING: The consumption of alcohol may make you think you are whispering when 
you are not.

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