personally, i thought this was old news, but since so many ATI fanboys seem to have a condition called "selective amnesia" here is your reminder, and for those that take the "moral high road" and say they would "NEVER" buy a card from a company that "cheats on benchmarks", you may now STFU and buy a matrox.
of course the ATI fanboys dont like talking about this... they try to downplay it because of only a 1.9%-3% improvement, since ATI cannot seem to write a stable driver it would only make sense they would suck at "cheating" too! ROFL!!! but hey "cheating" is cheating"...another thing to consider is a 1.9% to 3% improvement in the triple digit fps range can make the difference between beating the competition and losing to them... do the math and see for yourself! what is the percentage difference between 150 and 154.5 is, scores are often that close.
personally i think the code for all benchmarking programs should be opensourced, it would be indicitive of who could optimize thier respective cards for games better, and whoever loses would not have the option to bitch and complain about "cheating" and use it as an excuse.
the way i see it they both wrote optimizations (AKA "cheated") i say more power to both of them...since they both did thier optimizations on code that was not open sourced, the ethical issue arisees from that. if either/both companies altered code i had copyrighted, i probobly would not be to happy especially considering i would let both of them do it if they had but asked.
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/radeonquack/default.asp
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1105259,00.asp?kc=ETNKT0209KTX1K0100361
of course the ATI fanboys dont like talking about this... they try to downplay it because of only a 1.9%-3% improvement, since ATI cannot seem to write a stable driver it would only make sense they would suck at "cheating" too! ROFL!!! but hey "cheating" is cheating"...another thing to consider is a 1.9% to 3% improvement in the triple digit fps range can make the difference between beating the competition and losing to them... do the math and see for yourself! what is the percentage difference between 150 and 154.5 is, scores are often that close.
personally i think the code for all benchmarking programs should be opensourced, it would be indicitive of who could optimize thier respective cards for games better, and whoever loses would not have the option to bitch and complain about "cheating" and use it as an excuse.
the way i see it they both wrote optimizations (AKA "cheated") i say more power to both of them...since they both did thier optimizations on code that was not open sourced, the ethical issue arisees from that. if either/both companies altered code i had copyrighted, i probobly would not be to happy especially considering i would let both of them do it if they had but asked.
http://firingsquad.gamers.com/hardware/radeonquack/default.asp
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,1105259,00.asp?kc=ETNKT0209KTX1K0100361