Cheat codes, baby.
NVidia has apparently been caught cheating. The new FX5900 got really good scores on 3DMark, a synthetic benchmark that runs the same sequence of events. It beat the Radeon 9800 Pro by a lot, while it was really close on the actual game benchmarks. Apparently, this was because they modified their drivers specifically for this benchmark, taking advantage of the repeatability of the benchmark. Now, this isn’t new. ATI was caught lowering the detail level of Quake III to get better scores. This is interesting from several perspectives, but mostly academically, because I don’t plan an buying a card like this any time soon. First, apparently the crown of “Fastest Card” is so important that it’s worth cheating, and taking the risk that you’ll get caught. It also makes me wonder what cheating hasn’t gotten caught. Second, it shows how incredibly bloated the drivers for these cards are in Windows. I mean, putting in special case code for individual frames of an entire benchmark? That’s unbelievable, and must result in absolutely huge drivers. You could never get away with this if your drivers were open source. Third, how much developer time went into this? It must have cost NVidia an absolute fortune to pay developers to analyze the benchmarks frame by frame and put in the cheat code. Then again, maybe they have software to do it automatically. That’s, in a way, more disturbing, that they would have software designed to add cheat code to their drivers. Finally, this is additional proof, to me, that anyone who believes that people are basically good is deluding themselves. Given a reasonable chance that they’ll get away with it, anyone will cheat. And lets face it. Cheaters frequently prosper.
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