Futuremark flames Nvidia over benchmarks

THE FOLKS AT FUTUREMARK have decided to take some radical steps against Nvidia and what it describes as "questionable drivers", the versions of Detonator 42.67, 42.68 and 42.69.

These drivers arrived after the first 3dmark03 benchmarks when the ATI card dramatically outscored FX 5800 Ultra.

In future, Futuremark said it wants to have only WHQL drivers in its database to avoid erring on the side of err, erring.

It added that this doesn't mean Futuremark is "banning all beta/leaked drivers" -- they are "simply disabled from being published".

Futuremark added: "The reason for this is that the drivers have been officially stated as optimized for 3DMark03, and we can not verify the purity and integrity of the drivers. We are investigating the drivers and their effect on 3DMark03 - both performance and the rendering quality (i.e. image quality)."

From the times when Nvidia doubled its 3dmark03 score we were working with our people to get some answers and some of the other guys had similar ideas to ours, which you can read on NV News.

When we asked Nvidia if its drivers rendered at 64-bit only, and for WHQL certification and DirectX 9 you needed minimum 96bit, this upset some Nvidia people so much that one executive told us at CeBIT it had broken off all relations with the INQUIRER. He even muttered darkly about legal action. [Shouldn't he be talking to the Ed? Ed.]

Nvidia still claims 128 bit precision for the FX 5800 card.

L'INQ
Futuremark statement