ATI/nVIDIA Benchmark Fuss Continues

olefarte · Aug 6, 2003

Looks like this benchmark mess is still ongoing. I don't think it will ever end as long as there is competiton between these two companies. [H]ardOcp has a rereview of a review they did, in which they say ATi openly disagrees with. If you don't feel like reading the whole thing, go to the last page, the conclusion, and it gives a pretty good summary of what they found. It looks pretty inconclusive to me, to close to really call any real difference between the two.

Will it ever stop? ATI has confronted HardOCP saying that their Unreal Tournament 2003 benchmark heavily favors the GFFX 5900 while giving the 9800 Pro a disadvantage. Whatever. "ATI has come to us and told us that our UT2K3 benchmarks were off in our BFGTech Asylum 5900 Ultra review and that the benchmark numbers we shared were damaging the 9800 line of products. This was first brought to me by their PR Director, Chris Evenden, last Tuesday morning. At that time they did not submit any proof of their claims that shed light on the specific benchmarks we used. As of posting this, ATI has still never given us proof of any of their statements specific to the benchmarks they suggest are damaging to their product. Still, there was no doubt that ATI was genuinely concerned with the benchmark numbers. HardOCP has been incredibly critical of Image Quality this year and we have not been afraid to share our results with you, as was shown here in March of this year in this article that directly called NVIDIA's IQ into question. With that said, we are genuinely concerned with representing video cards performance to our readers fairly. So with ATI's prompting, Brent Justice and I decided to look further into the matter, but did so independently. Meaning that he did his own testing, as did I, and this article represents the joint conclusions we arrived at." The whole article is here.

acidosmosis · Aug 6, 2003

Do let us say this. If you are spending your hard earned dollars on video cards now days and doing so based on framerate numbers alone, you are cheating yourself. We have moved beyond the days of 3dfx and it seems to us that stellar Image Quality accompanied by a comfortable framerate is what you really should be looking for when investing in your next video card. Benchmarks numbers we show will not be collected in a vacuum so that they do not represent the real-world gaming experiences. That means that sometimes we will have situations where all things are not purely apples-to-apples between products.

If we thought we could get away with doing a comparative video card evaluation and not show any benchmark framerates, we would do it. We don't think the world is quite ready for that yet, but maybe soon.

AMEN!

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ATI/nVIDIA Benchmark Fuss Continues

olefarte TechSpot Ambassador

acidosmosis TechSpot Chancellor