nVidia drivers & 3dmark2003

Originally posted by Humus:

I’m losing my faith in humanity.

Dismaying indeed…

The fact is - ATI guys were unable to push those 24%
Anywayz, game test 4 is quite stupid, as it’s rendering everything in back to front order, so eliminating all the Z-prerendering stuff, not exactly the best thing to show all the technology for FX. And I can’t imagine, where you are going to render sky (fullscreen) in pixel shader, then occlude 75% of it with grass and so on, that also takes a lot of worthy ps/vs time.

Thx Humus!

But I’ll stay with Nvidia. They need my support/money right now

Just hope, that there will be a fx with passive cooling soon. I HATE fan-noise…

Originally posted by Korval:
[b] Someone who is doesn’t even really understand what a “driver” means doesn’t want to sit there trying to understand 1001 different options. They want one file to download and fix the problem (and they only do this to fix probelms; they never get new drivers just because there are new ones).[b]

of course. but i just think such people that are able to download and install some driver are as well able to choose their language. and if thei’re not sure, they click the “not sure” button and get simply everything


As it turns out, these people don’t care that it’s a 22MB file, nor how long it takes to download. They just want the problem fixed, quickly without a lot of fuss.

yeah, quickly. with a 22MB file, this is NOT quickly. quickly is a mather of maximal 2 minutes. including installation and rebooting.
IFF they don’t want to know how to update, please make an auto-update funktion. 22 MB for a driver are stupid. final point. espencially as i can see they got hacked together to 6mb or so in the end.

anyways, nvidia lives in a broadband only world (unlike me…), and they love to put huge downloads online, from cg stuff, to sdk stuff, to demos, to whatever. huge files…

oh well… i don’t need to bother about that. i’m actually more interested why there is no law against how nvidia tries to cheat their customers all the way…

Originally posted by M/\dm/
:
The fact is - ATI guys were unable to push those 24%
Anywayz, game test 4 is quite stupid, as it’s rendering everything in back to front order, so eliminating all the Z-prerendering stuff, not exactly the best thing to show all the technology for FX. And I can’t imagine, where you are going to render sky (fullscreen) in pixel shader, then occlude 75% of it with grass and so on, that also takes a lot of worthy ps/vs time.

if i remember right you’re the nvidia fanboy 've seen somewhere else…

anyways. its not a mather if 3dmark is stupid or not. its a quest. and nvidia showed to not be able to solve the quest in a fair and simple way fast. they had to cheat to get a good result. this is poor.

like the 1337 counterstrike-cheaters who are bether than the others because they’re so cool they can play against the rules given to them.

nVIDIA, thats NOT the way its ment to be played!

its btw a nice feeling to just overclock my radeon and voilà, i’ve beaten the fx5900 WITH cheating! and i run the patchversion…

even more fun, thats still a first-edition 9700pro. quite an old card now and quite cheap to find at some places…

oh, and humus. give up the believe in good. i’ve lost it the moment terrorism got more than a counterstrike group, the moment war is the way to solve peace, and the moment cheating is the way to solve bad hw problems.

fairness isn’t cool in this world anymore. all that mathers is YOU stand on top of ALL THE OTHERS. no mather how, no mather if they’re all dead in the end so there is no other. the main point is you have to be the highest.

fun is, nvidia does not give any real statement… or did they? anyone seen nvidia dudes posting in here? noooo too bad.

the best move nvidia did (marketingstyle) is to release the funny video. showing hey, we can joke about ourselves, we’re bether now.

while thei’re not…

Actually I’m turning into NVidiot in the eyes of others, because I’ve found some stupid things that are done through a$$ and I can’t understand why.

I guess you still can’t answer why 3DMark==tomorrows ‘sunrise’, is doing the stuff through a$$. The Game test 4 IS DEFINATELY STRESSING FP, AND THE CARD WITH LOWER PRECISION WILL WIN NO MATTER WHAT! ESPECIALLY WHEN THERE IS A LOT FP WORK, THAT IS ++75% HIDDEN, AND ALL THIS S**T WORK IN FAVOR FOR ATI. BRING Z CULLING IN AND THERE’S UNREAL STORY as unneeded fp computations will be dropped and main workload will lean toward vertex computation and then Nvidia with 500MHz or 425MHz core will go up. So I THINK 3D Mark IS shifted towards ATI.
And if FX5900 is capable of keeping up with ATI at fp with their higher precission fp then my sympathies goes to NVidia. Unfortunately, end users can’t even imagine the difference between 96-bit computations an 128-bit computations & even worse they don’t see it that easy (though you CAN fell it a bit) and you can’t push all the backtofront frontoback stuff in their heads that easy, result => ATI almost wins

Originally posted by M/\dm/
:
And if FX5900 is capable of keeping up with ATI at fp with their higher precission fp then my sympathies goes to NVidia.

And if 9800Pro can beat FX5900 with its lower clock speed, then my sympathies goes to ATI

Strong arguments, really.

With doing things that you can do really fast, but that are obstructed later anywayz At least, cards that tries to do the same UNNEEDED stuff more precisely (as they are forced to skip Z-test) are kicked away
The situation is: you must walk 10 meters to get to the target (fast), but you are forced to do 20 spins at the beginning, ATI can spin werrrrry fast, but clumsy, Nvidia does the same slower & a bit cleaner, but in the end everything that matters is time you’ve spend in the way I prefer card that can walk fast, as I’m not going to watch it spinning on the place I’ll (drop that step with Z-oclussion)

[This message has been edited by M/\dm/
(edited 05-28-2003).]

Originally posted by harsman:
I hate to fuel this thread further but… Dopefish you haven’t actually ran the fairy demo have you? Sure renaming the exe causes “different results” but not of the kind you’re talking about…

My gf4mx wont run it, so no, I havent done it personally. My radeon9500 crapped out, so Ive ordered a second one from ATI, and am still waiting for it after 2 months. They havent shipped it yet, and they keep giving me dates further and further away.

My personal experiences with ATI drivers when my old card worked… crashing… incorrect rendering results… texture corruption… infact swapping 2 lines of code around that had absolutely nothing to do with rendering changed the results of how some things rendered. And this was all with the very latest drivers at the time.

As for the results of the dawn demo… search a little and youll find a lot of first-hand verifications of it… whether they are true or not I dont know for sure, but the sheer number of them certainally seems to say so.

M/\dm/
:

  1. Do you believe that 3dMark is meant to be a test of a video card’s rendering capabilities or how well the IHVs “optimize” their drivers to render the scene?

  2. Do you think it’s appropriate to incorporate an “optimization” that can never be used in any game (I’m talking about the static clip planes)?

My own answers to these questions:

  1. It is a test of rendering performance. Everyone has to render the scene the same way, so it’s a fair comparison, regardless of how efficient or inefficient code is.

  2. Any optimizations that are added to drivers should be those that can be used in games. Also, the end result of these optmizations should be indistinguishable from the output intended by the application’s developers.

Alright, I’ll make it clear: If you change the name of the exe to quake3.exe or 3dmark03.exe the fairy loses her clothes. She gets nekkid. That’s what all the juvenile giggling was about, that’s what all those posts you’ve seen refer too. Lighten up

Btw, where can you find a detailed description of 3DMark2003 tests?
I mean, how is it known what’s the rendering order of 3DMark or the shadows methods used. I’ve often seen discussions here about how 3DMark algorithms work, but I wanted to find a reliable source.

I’ve found a whitepaper on Futuremark website but it’s just marketting crap hidden by some technical terms.

…i remember i saw some transcription of some TV-show with JC/nVidia/ATI/FutureMark involved (just don’t remember where )… And isn’t that was nVidia attacking ATI by the reason of supposed ATI cheating under that benchmark? ??? And isn’t that was nVidia so mad about that synthetic game test in there?? ??? And isn’t that was nVidia considering the actual game tests as a better way to go with the video-hardware testing? ???

Originally posted by harsman:
Alright, I’ll make it clear: If you change the name of the exe to quake3.exe or 3dmark03.exe the fairy loses her clothes. She gets nekkid. That’s what all the juvenile giggling was about, that’s what all those posts you’ve seen refer too. Lighten up

Its not what the change is that is the point tho, its the fact that there is change.

I can’t remember exactly where, but one of Futuremark’s beta members pointed out that in game test 4 rendering is made back to front, and that all buffer is filled with sky, and then occluded, so making this test real stresser for FP in other word for NV(AND THAT’S WHY NVIDIA IS TRYING TO CHEAT AS THEY CAN’T MATCH IN SPEED IN FP BECAUSE OF FP24 vs FP32)!
I can’t accept when fp cycles are wasted on unneeded job to show how fast it is, if they can’t write the shaders that shows real difference, but that are not overwritten anyway, then they are unneded it’s something like:
for(int i=0;i<500;i++)
a=sin(i);
in fp, the results are skipped, but cycles wasted, and if card tries to calculate sin more precilesly it gets shot in leg MORE.
So in test 4 it works like
calculate sky in CARDS MAX PRECISION THAT IS >FP24 write to framebuffer, then calculate grass, ground trees in same vp/fp and overwrite 75% of the tuff jobe done, trash it!
But in realtime environment I wouldn’t go this way, as Z-oclussion in such cases can make rendering A LOT faster, as you are doing a lot of unneeded job, and because of such approach ati clearly wins because of 96-bit format.

BTW, talking about cheating, I ran 3DMark on FX5200@1024x768+everything maxed out in both first build and 330 and the funniest thing was that with all settings equal, build 330 scored 1 3D Mark more

madman. THATS WHAT A BENCHMARK IS FOR! NOT TO BE INTELLIGENT CODED, BUT TO TEST OUT IF SOME HW CAN PERFORM WELL!!
what you think pc-benchmarks work like? possibly exaclty a simple for(i from 0 to 500000) x = sin(x);
3dmark looks nice, but in the end its just that: DRAWING DRAWING DRAWING. its NOT important if they draw useless stuff. they could draw white textures as well, and you would not see anything.

3dmark does draw some stuff. its the gpu’s and drivers job to do that work, and to show they can do it fast. nvidia FAILS to show they’re able to do it fast, so they cheated to look like thei’re able to do it fast. they simply CAN NOT. and that is the fault of NVIDIA. NOT 3dmark. 3dmark gave a quest. nvidia cannot win that.

and the fp24 against fp32. thats a bad choise nvidia did. its known now for more than 1 year that the minimum requirement for next hw will be fp24. NVIDIA CHOOOSE to NOT support fp24 but only fp16 and fp32. everyone KNEW that fp16 will be too low to get accepted, its under the minimum requirements. and everyone KNEW nvidia hw will be slower on fp32 than ati on fp24. but it was THEIR choise!

nvidia did a lot wrong with the nv30++ hw. but it was their choise. they don’t have to blame now 3dmark that THEY designed hw that is NOT able to solve todays requested tasks fast. any good gpu can handle 3dmark very well. just not nvidia cards.

and if you stop nvfanboying, but really look back, you would note that the same was even true for gf3 and co. those gpu’s don’t follow the dx8 line really, but the additional features are not usable in dx.

result: they are much worse performing than a real dx8.1 hw for example, namely radeon8500+.

the nvidia cards DO have power. but not where they need them.

same as not supporting general floating textures… bull**** that is.

Originally posted by DopeFish:
Its not what the change is that is the point tho, its the fact that there is change.

It’s the wrapper that does the change!!! Not the driver.
Why don’t you just read up on it instead of making baseless claims?

>>>result: they are much worse performing than a real dx8.1 hw for example, namely radeon8500+.

the nvidia cards DO have power. but not where they need them.<<<

That’s more or less true. The 8500 was a good competitor to the Gf3 line but I wouldn’t put my money on the 8500. It’s not as simple as “the 8500 beats the Gf3 on every point, therefore the 8500 is superior” or vice-versa.
For that geenration, the Nvidia cards had better driver support and more interesting extensions.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20010814/radeon8500-14.html

and see the related pages there.
Bottom line : the 8500 you say? **** that!

It’s only the R300 that caught my eye. Now ATI impresses me.

But this time Futuremark is doing TOTALLY synthetic bench in favor for ATI, they are testing ATI’s strong sides, & undoubtfully NV’s will be faster in DOOM3 and other upcoming games, though most likely OGL ones.
If there would be stress for ATIs hierarchial Z buffer and NVIDIAs Z oclussion culling, I fell there would be another story, but WE CAN’T DO THE TEST THE WAY IT HURTS OUR BETA MEMBERS, CAN WE? Especially knowing the fact that those marks influence sales a lot.

Originally posted by Humus:
It’s the wrapper that does the change!!! Not the driver.
Why don’t you just read up on it instead of making baseless claims?

Originally posted by DopeFish:
As for the results of the dawn demo… search a little and youll find a lot of first-hand verifications of it… whether they are true or not I dont know for sure, but the sheer number of them certainally seems to say so.

I should rest my case there, but shall go on:

And tell me, what reason would this wrapper have to change how it is rendered based on executable filename? The wrapper which was made to run the dawn demo on ATI hardware having special cases for quake3.exe and 3dmark.exe?

I have read around, and everything that Ive read has said that changing the executable filename results in different rendering results. Perhaps you should read my post instead of making baseless claims.