Nvidia accused of playing dirty

EVERYONE THOUGHT that Nvidia was back in style with the Geforce FX5900 but a fairly major issue has cropped up. ExtremeTech has accused Nvidia of playing fast and loose with its 44.03 Detonator drivers to up its scores in 3DMark03.

The site has an in-depth analysis by way of explanation for its accusation and, it has to be said that the explanation is quite thorough. Nvidia is certainly going to have to work hard to get itself out of this spot.

The tests run by ExtremeTech point towards some very naughty goings on that were only discovered using a developer version of 3DMark03.

It's a huge shame that such a damning charge should be levelled at the firm only days after it had launched the FX5900. Doubly so as the card is obviously the fastest on the market without any cheating.

Nvidia has told ExtremeTech that it is investigating what is going on. The public will probably never know exactly. With earlier drivers already showing suspicious behaviour with 3DMark03, one of two possibilities come to mind. One is that there was official sanction to find a way of optimising drivers for the benchmark in a much less obvious way. The other is that an over-loyal driver developer worked at doing the dirty without official sanction.

Whatever the reason, Nvidia has landed itself right in it. To be caught cheating at 3DMark once is bad enough. Twice is just incompetence. The only possible benefit to the company is that the cheating potential could make the benchmark obsolete, something that many inside Nvidia would consider sweet revenge. µ

L'INQS
ExtremeTech article