Not telling them is a bit weird since the fact there is a special edition for Nvidia is all over the net...so I'm not sure either

yeah, the benchmark version is prolly equally optimzed
for each card, but Id might have given Nvidia the chance
to optimize their drivers for it, and leaving ATi unknowing
about it..

so the fault could lie in the driver optimizations and not
the doom3 code itself..
And that could be a way of Id to get even hehe...
well its just speculations...

"Gabe Newell: If you look at the surveys we've done of the hardware our customers have (on Speakeasy.net), there are two companies that dominate - NVIDIA and ATI. We've spent a lot of time working with both companies. Right now for the DX9 generation, ATI is significantly ahead in terms of absolute performance and price/performance. We are working pretty hard with NVIDIA to try to optimize the situation with regards to getting their performance up to snuff. We spend more of our time with ATI working on new features like high-dynamic range rendering (HDR) which is a new technique to create more life-like lighting."