ATI cheating on benchmarks?

[tartarhus]

I guess this does it for me. I've always been a faithful patron of ATI products, but I think I'll have to throw in the towel now. I don't have a problem with game tweaking for improved performance, however, manipulating spects to achieve better benchmark scores by sacrificing quality is a real issue. It seems ATI has fiddled with mip mapping to up its quake 3 benchmarking by subversively sacrificing display image. Now I fear I'll have to tweak every game just to get a decent display on an ATI card. Not to mention all currently published benchmarks for ATI have to be taken with a grain of salt (perhaps, a handful). First clock speed foolery, now deceptive benchmark tweaking, what next? I've never bought an nvidia card, but I don't think I can avoid it.

For the lowdown on ATI tweakings etc. check out www.tech-report.com or www.rage3d.com.


-- Chaos is the better order.

 

[eden]

It's true... I used to like those guys a lot, being a Canadian fellow...their Raeg Pro 8meg did wonders for me, but now I use Voodoo 3 2000. I will go for GF3 Ti200. But ATI now has deceived us all big time, and they will be punished somehow.

 

[Matisaro]

Yep, the 8500 may be good on paper, and may have been the next big thing, but ATI apparently has so little faith in its abilities it resorts to cheating to make it look better.


Shame ATI.

~Matisaro~
"The Cash Left In My Pocket,The BEST Benchmark"
~Tbird1.3@1.5~

 

[OzzieBloke]

It seems a little like an act of desparation, doesn't it? Each product they have brought out has had shoddy drivers, and has taken a long time to fix them up. Radeon 1 cards were probably the best of the lot, but even then, remember the promotional video they had for it? It was supposed to be a 'realtime' rendering done by the video card. Later, it was revealed that it was a pre-rendered clip.

Now ATI have released drivers to make a card that is physically superior to the GeForce 3 cards perform slightly worse, by crippling image quality, because they can't get their act together when it comes to making reliable, *functional* drivers.

I was quietly wishing this company to do something to really compete against the GeForce 3 cards, but with deception of this level (not saying that other companies don't deceive, but they aren't as blatant about it) I say that ATI has botched it well an truly.

To ATI I say this: Pull your finger out. Stop worrying about what the competition is doing and trying to get fps by reducing image quality, and spend your time worrying about how to improve your drivers. What good is having a Ferrari stuck in second gear? You've got the hardware, now work on your drivers.

How long is a piece of string? The same shape as something beige.