Game road to 1.0

[Scott Ritchie]

On Sun, 2007-03-25 at 18:43 +0200, Stefan Dösinger wrote:
> > Does anyone here know if the NVIDIA Windows drivers are still rigged
> > with regards to the various 3DMark suite of benchmarks?  There was a
> > scandal a while back, and the company claimed to pull their special
> > hacks out, but then they were caught again later doing the same thing.
> > It'd be a shame if we were testing rigged Windows drivers vs unrigged
> > Linux ones.
> I think the windows driver has a huge game Database with per game 
> optimizations. I think I saw it in their control applet, you can even change 
> the settings. (I don't have a access to a Windows nvidia machine atm).
>
> Last I knew the Linux driver allows similar tuning. And if someone wants to he 
> can write a specialized wine patch and put a per game hack collection 
> somewhere. I personally don't think theres anything wrong if nvidia provides 
> me with fine-tuned per game settings. Honestly I wouldn't put hundreds of 
> hacks into my own code, but if nvidia thinks they can manage that, ok with 
> me :-)

"Optimizations" aren't the issue here - hacks that break the application
but still make the benchmark appear to render fine are.

Here is an article discussing the issue:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1086025,00.asp

Essentially, they completely broke the rendering engine by hard-coding
assumptions about where the camera would be into the driver.  Move the
camera slightly (such as in the developer version of 3D Mark), and
everything is a garbled mess.

This defeats the entire purpose of a benchmark as a real-application
performance test, since the benchmark is converted from a simulation of
real game rendering calculations to instead be a glorified movie.

Thanks,
Scott Ritchie