첨부사진 1.클릭시 확대됩니다.
Further NVIDIA optimizations for 3DMark03? Quake/Quack, meet 3DMark/3DMurk
WELL, I CAN HARDLY BELIEVE we re back on this subject again, but this saga just won t die.
Let me try my best to bring you up to speed. First, there was a late, difficult birth for NVIDIA s new line of GeForce FX chips, especially the stillborn GeForce FX 5800 Ultra. Then, NVIDIA voiced complaints and concerns about FutureMark s new version of 3DMark, the DirectX 9-based 3DMark03. 3DMark s publisher, FutureMark, fought back, and it was a hoot—a big, public brawl between hardware vendor and benchmark house.
Once GeForce FX review units finally trickled out to reviewers, folks started finding driver optimizations on the FX cards that #FFCC66uced image fidelity to gain performance. NVIDIA s spiffy new Detonator FX drivers seemed to fix that problem, and improved performance dramatically. But then ExtremeTech published an article exposing specific optimizations in the Detonator FX drivers intended to inflate 3DMark03 benchmark scores.
Mmm. Fishy.
Soon, FutureMark released an audit report confirming the problems with the NVIDIA drivers and explicitly stating that NVIDIA was cheating. NVIDIA disagreed. Brouhaha ensued. ATI, for its part, was also caught optimizing its drivers. ATI owned up, pointed out that its optimizations didn t change image output, and pledged to remove them from its next driver release anyhow.
FutureMark released a new build of 3DMark03 that disabled the disputed driver optimizations. (We benchmarked the build with optimizations versus the build without.) Dell then weighed in in support of 3DMark03. Presumably after some behind-the-scenes legal wrangling, FutureMark issued a joint statement with NVIDIA backing down from the "cheat" word.
And that s where we are now. Phew. Thank goodness for hyperlinks. This story has been unfolding long enough to induce fatigue in certain quarters.
Even more background
If you re old like me, you may remember the day when ATI was caught optimizing its Radeon 8500 drivers for Quake III Arena timedemos. The trick was simple: ATI s drivers looked for an executable named "quake3.exe" and turned down texture quality when "quake3.exe" started. Kyle Bennett at the cold, HardOCP renamed "quake3.exe" to "quack3.exe" and ran some benchmarks. ATI was busted.
In a funny twist of fate, I got a tip earlier this week about NVIDIA s Detonator FX drivers. The allegation: if you rename 3DMark03.exe to something else and run the benchmark with anisotropic filtering enabled in the drivers, test scores drop. In other words, NVIDIA appears to be using the same lame technique ATI did way back when: keying on the program s filename in order to trigger benchmark "optimizations." In this case, those optimizations appear to be a lower quality form of texture filtering than the anisotropic filtering method selected in the driver control panel. Many review sites like us benchmark cards with anisotropic filtering and edge antialiasing turned on, so these things do matter.
Keep in mind, now, that this goes beyond the eight specific Detonator FX "cheats" FutureMark identified in its audit report. This is in addition to all of those things, and this one works with the latest release version of 3DMark, build 330. It appears NVIDIA has taken yet another measure, which FutureMark didn t catch in its audit, in order to boost scores in 3DMark03.
You probably won t be surprised to learn that my tip came from ATI. The ATI folks say they were studying the Detonator FX driver s new filtering routines, to see what they could learn, when they discove#FFCC66 this quirk. (Some have claimed NVIDIA was the original source for the Quake/Quack debacle, but I have no first-hand knowledge about that.) Regardless, we felt compelled to test the Detonator FX drivers to see if the allegations were true. So we gathe#FFCC66 up a GeForce FX 5800 Ultra, a GeForce FX 5600, and a GeForce FX 5200 Ultra for a little benchmarking session. We brought along our typing fingers, so we could rename "3DMark03.exe" to "3DMurk03.exe" and see what happened. -snip-
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요지 : 쥐포스FX계열이 다이렉트X9을 지원하지 못하는 약점을 극복하기 위해서 다양한
방법으로 노력하던 엔비디아는.. 3DMark2003 에서 획기적으로 점수를 올릴수 있는
방법을 개발해내었다. 그방법은 3DMark03 이라는 파일이름에만 반응하여
정해진 몇가지 작업을 수행하지 않거나... 혹은 다른작업을 수행함으로서 프레임을
높이는 것이다.(예를 들자면 AF X8을 주어도 AFx2로 작동되는것.. 등등..)
이것은 3Dmark03.exe 라는 파일이름을 다른이름으로 바꿔주면 결과점수가
현저하게 떨어지는 것으로 알 수 있으며 일련의 작업에서 얻어지는 화면의 품질로도
알수 있다.
이로서 32->16bit 다운 레이팅 기법과 특정프로그램에서의 지정된 작업무시하기등으로
명실공히 최고 성능의 그래픽 카드로 군림할 수 있는 것이었다.
비교자료 : http://www.beyond3d.com/misc/3dmrendering/3dmurk.zip
NVNEWS 의 입장 : http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=f4391b8a0fe1619c3aa89ad5411c5da0&threadid=12985
