I'm sorry to say his response-rather, his lack of response, as it was only Evan and Kristopher, not Anand, that replied to the original article thread-was wholly unsatisfactory, and the much belated editing of the article into what you read today was unsatisfactory as well. Anand elicits possibly the greatest benefit of the doubt of any online hardware reviewer I know, as I've read his site and enjoyed the mature and thoughtful personality he imbued it with for years. As the thread wore on for weeks without a single change in the multiple errors perceived in the original article, I gradually became more curt in my requests for corrections. In the initial comment thread on this article, I was gentler in my (IMO, constructive) criticism. I realize this post comes off as harsh against both Anand and NVIDIA. NVIDIA appears to currently foster a culture of cutting corners without the customer's (and, hopefully, reviewer's) knowledge, and they appear reticent to admit it at all. ExtremeTech and B3D noted the 3DMark03 "optimizations." Digit-Life has noted CodeCreatures and UT2K3 benchmark "optimizations," and Beyond3D and AMDMB have presented pictorial evidence of what appears to be the reason for the benchmark gains. Recent articles have shown NVIDIA to be making questionable optimizations (that may be considered cheats in the context of a benchmark) in many games and benchmarks, yet I see only a handful of sites attempt to investigate these issues. What stands out most to me is that NVIDIA still can't look people in the eye and say they made a mistake by cheating in 3DMark03. "What stood out the most about NVIDIA was how some of their best people could look us in the eye and say "we made a mistake" (in reference to NV30)." 25 clicking will bring you to the one last Quake 3 graph with the incorrect analysis, noted above. Strangely, Splinter Cell is still listed in the article's drop-down menu as p. Apparently a second step has been taking, expunging Splinter Cell from the article text altogether.
#Unreal tournament 2018 graphics fix driver
The first step at correcting this mistake was to remove all Splinter Cell graphs and place a blurb in the driver section of the review blaming ATi for not disabling AA.
ATi's driver allow AA, warts and all, and thus produce appropriately dimished benchmark numbers, along with corresponding AA errors.
#Unreal tournament 2018 graphics fix drivers
The problem was that NVIDIA's drivers automatically disable AA if it's selected, yielding non-AA scores for what an unsupsecting reviewer believes is an AA mode. Thirdly, the article initially tested Splinter Cell with AA, though the game does not perform correctly with it. Sadly, the accompanying text has not been edited to reflect that. I can only conclude that the data were indeed erroneous, as they have been removed from the article. Was left unchanged, even though it was based on what many assumed were erroneous benchmark data.
"The GeForceFX 5900 Ultra does extremely well in Quake III Arena, to the point where it is CPU/platform bound at 1600x1200 with 4X AA/8X Anisotropic filtering enabled." And yet, after weeks of protest in the forum thread on this article, all that happened was the benchmark results for 12x10 and 16x12 were removed. At 1600x1200 with 4xAA 8xAF, Anand was scoring over 200fps, well higher than any other review. Secondly, Anand's initial Quake 3 5900U numbers seemed way off compared to other sites that tested the same card in similar systems at the same settings. Hopefully this will be explored fully once a Doom3 demo is released to the public, and we have more open benchmarking of this anticipated game. Note that forcing AF in the video card's drivers, rather than via the application, will result in higher performance and potentially lower image quality! This was shown to be the case both in a TechReport article on 3DM03 ("3DMurk"), in forum discussions at B3D, and in an editorial at THG.
People will see 9800P 256MB numbers and note that its extra memory makes no difference over its 128MB sibling, yet only if they read the article carefully would they know that the driver Anand used limits the 9800P 256MB to only 128MB, essentially crippling the card.Īlso, note the difference between Medium Quality and High Quality modes in Doom 3 is only anisotropic filtering (AF), which is enabled in HQ mode. This strikes me as not only incorrect but irresponsible. Anand acknowledged that he could not get the 9800P 256MB to run the tech demo properly, yet he includes the numbers anyway. Pete - Tuesday, Jlink I think this is a great article with a few significant flaws in its benchmarking.įirstly, the Doom 3 numbers.