Dave Baumann and the Reverend at Beyond3D have been busy bunnies chatting to Tim Sweeney at Epic and to ATI's Director of PR, Christ Evenden about cheating and optimizations brought up by Nvidia's Detonator FX 44.03.
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Tim Sweeney on cheating vs optimizations Optimization techniques which change your function into a function that extensionally differs from what you specified are generally not considered valid optimizations. These sorts of optimizations have occasionally been exposed, for example, in C++ compilers as features that programmers can optionally enable when they want the extra performance and are willing to accept that the meaning of their function is being changed but hopefully to a reasonable numeric approximation. One example of this is Visual C++'s "improve float consistency" option. Such non-extensional optimizations, in all sane programming systems, default to off.
ATI's Christ Evenden Responses to the Futuremark 3DMark03 Patch and Driver Audit Report The 1.9% performance gain comes from optimization of the two DX9 shaders (water and sky) in Game Test 4 . We render the scene exactly as intended by Futuremark, in full-precision floating point. Our shaders are mathematically and functionally identical to Futuremark's and there are no visual artifacts; we simply shuffle instructions to take advantage of our architecture. These are exactly the sort of optimizations that work in games to improve frame rates without reducing image quality and as such, are a realistic approach to a benchmark intended to measure in-game performance. However, we recognize that these can be used by some people to call into question the legitimacy of benchmark results, and so we are removing them from our driver as soon as is physically possible. We expect them to be gone by the next release of CATALYST."
We take a look at the rendering precision under the 320 and 330 versions of 3DMark03
Driver Irregularities with 3DMark03 Screenshots
LOL? Nice one BetrayerX:
Read More.
Tim Sweeney on cheating vs optimizations Optimization techniques which change your function into a function that extensionally differs from what you specified are generally not considered valid optimizations. These sorts of optimizations have occasionally been exposed, for example, in C++ compilers as features that programmers can optionally enable when they want the extra performance and are willing to accept that the meaning of their function is being changed but hopefully to a reasonable numeric approximation. One example of this is Visual C++'s "improve float consistency" option. Such non-extensional optimizations, in all sane programming systems, default to off.
ATI's Christ Evenden Responses to the Futuremark 3DMark03 Patch and Driver Audit Report The 1.9% performance gain comes from optimization of the two DX9 shaders (water and sky) in Game Test 4 . We render the scene exactly as intended by Futuremark, in full-precision floating point. Our shaders are mathematically and functionally identical to Futuremark's and there are no visual artifacts; we simply shuffle instructions to take advantage of our architecture. These are exactly the sort of optimizations that work in games to improve frame rates without reducing image quality and as such, are a realistic approach to a benchmark intended to measure in-game performance. However, we recognize that these can be used by some people to call into question the legitimacy of benchmark results, and so we are removing them from our driver as soon as is physically possible. We expect them to be gone by the next release of CATALYST."
We take a look at the rendering precision under the 320 and 330 versions of 3DMark03
Driver Irregularities with 3DMark03 Screenshots
LOL? Nice one BetrayerX:
