ATi cheating?

olefarte · Oct 30, 2003

Here's some strong words from nVidia, ATi and Kyle at HardOCP. This is the whole article, it's kind of hard to find on the home page of HardOCP.

ATI Responds to Cheating:
At the recent editor's day held by NVIDIA, they informed the media of instances of where ATI was "cheating" in two games and a benchmark based on a game engine. Here is what ATI has to say.

We would like to respond to the recent allegations of benchmark cheating levied against ATI.

We take these allegations very seriously and are distressed by the implication that we are cheating our customers. At ATI we have taken a strong stance against application specific optimizations in benchmarks. Further, we never force optimizations that deliver lower image quality than the game developer has intended.

Three applications have been specifically questioned: UT2003, Halo and AquaMark3.

UT2003: We are working with Epic, to address a bug that has a slight impact on the image quality in the game and benchmark in certain situations. This is a known issue that has been recognized by both ATI and Epic as a bug. ATI is not cheating in any way in this application.

Halo: Although allegations of cheating have been made, no one has been able to find any example of decreased image quality in the game. In fact, many examples have been documented on the web where ATI cards and drivers are rendering a superior image to competing products. Again, ATI is not cheating in any way in this application.

AquaMark3: We are currently investigating our rendering in AquaMark3. We have identified that we are rendering an image that is slightly different than the reference rasterizer, but at this point in time we are unable to identify why that is. We believe that this does not have any impact on our performance. Our investigation will continue to identify the cause and resolve it as soon as possible. One point to note is that we render the same image using our latest driver (CATALYST 3.8) as we do with a driver that pre-dates the release of Aquamark3 by almost six months (CATALYST 3.2). Also, in all of our dealings with the developer of Aquamark3, at no point have they advised us that they are unsatisfied with the images that we are rendering. We do not have any application specific optimizations in our driver and we are not cheating in this application.

If you have further questions about the way RADEON graphics cards render in these application we encourage you to contact the game's developers directly.

We are disappointed that certain media outlets chose to perpetuate the allegations, made originally by a competitor, in their articles without an understanding of what was happening and without contacting us for comment.

We are committed to delivering the best gaming experience possible, without sacrificing image quality for increased performance in benchmarks.

(And Kyle replied)

If you go back and look at our recent GeForceFX 5950Ultra Preview, you will notice that we covered the two games that are actually referred to above, as for the benchmark put out by the NVIDIA "TWIWMTBP" Partner, we find little reason to evaluate that as we do not use it and you can not play it. After evaluating multiple screenshots of each game and hours of ingame evaluation we saw no difference in UT2K3 that were worth mentioning. We did find that ATI had a better overall image quality in Halo. So if ATI is cheating in Halo, NVIDIA is just doing a bad job rendering the scene. You take your pick of which you would rather have.

NVIDIA has been caught red handed this year cheating. They have admitted this to me in private meetings. Before they stand in front of us and accuse their competition, they owe you and me a public apology. This is not the first time we have said this. Quite frankly, I have seen NVIDIA do some pretty questionable things in the past but this all takes the cake on the hypocrisy-meter.

It is pretty sad when the only way to advance your product is to tear down your competition's. NVIDIA's product is sub-standard when compared to ATI's in the DX9 gaming arena. We know, ATI knows it, and NVIDIA damn sure knows it. NVIDIA needs to concentrate their resources on making a product better than the competition's instead of spreading what we see as FUD to the press who will inevitably regurgitate it to you guys.

NVIDIA should be ashamed of themselves. I know we are ashamed of them.

TechSpot

ATi cheating?

olefarte TechSpot Ambassador