Re:I'd have to say yes... (Score 1)

Normally I'd agree with you, but that's because in many cases, vendors seem to tune their drivers for the benchmarks at the expense of everything else - Q3A scores go up, but real-world performance suffers. If they've figured out some way to boost Q3A performance without having some performance trade-off somewhere (and they aren't spending so much time on Quake tweaking that their drivers lag in other areas), then I say it's fair game...

I'd like to point out that if something as simple as changing "Quake" to "Quack" reduces performance by 15%, chances are that other Q3A-based games that don't contain the word "Quake" are probably not seeing the performance increase that Q3A is, even though the majority of the engine code may be the same. Therefore, if ATI is trying to convince customers that games based on the Q3A engine will run faster on their cards, this kind of optimization may be outright fraud.

It would be different if ATI created a driver that analyzed the manner in which the card was being used to trigger a Q3A-oriented optimization, but as I understand it, that's not what's going on here. ATI has improved performance for a single executable as opposed to a class of games for the the sole purpose of improving the performance of a game that is commonly used as a benchmark, and they did so without informing the public. I don't see how there can be any question that what ATI did here was unethical.