Nieuwe nVidia 3DMark03 cheat ontdekt

De mannen van The Tech Report berichten dat nVidia, naast de onlangs ontdekte driver-modificaties voor 3DMark, meer trucjes uithaalt om de benchmark score op een oneerlijke wijze omhoog te krikken. Het blijkt dat wanneer 3Dmark.exe wordt hernoemd naar 3Dmurk.exe de score bij het gebruik van 8x anisotropic filtering aanzienlijk daalt. Op 1024x768x32 neemt de totale score af met 734 punten van 4029 punten naar 3295 punten. In het verleden gebruikte ATi eenzelfde techniek om Quake III scores omhoog te peppen:

In a funny twist of fate, I got a tip earlier this week about NVIDIA's Detonator FX drivers. The allegation: if you rename 3DMark03.exe to something else and run the benchmark with anisotropic filtering enabled in the drivers, test scores drop. In other words, NVIDIA appears to be using the same lame technique ATI did way back when: keying on the program's filename in order to trigger benchmark "optimizations." In this case, those optimizations appear to be a lower quality form of texture filtering than the anisotropic filtering method selected in the driver control panel. Many review sites like us benchmark cards with anisotropic filtering and edge antialiasing turned on, so these things do matter.

Keep in mind, now, that this goes beyond the eight specific Detonator FX "cheats" FutureMark identified in its audit report. This is in addition to all of those things, and this one works with the latest release version of 3DMark, build 330. It appears NVIDIA has taken yet another measure, which FutureMark didn't catch in its audit, in order to boost scores in 3DMark03.