Re:What is wrong with us? (Score 3, Informative)

Lets not forget that about 4 months ago Nvidia deemed 3D Mark2003 a poor representation of real world scenarios, so how could they be "Cheating" if they pointed this out before hand? and what about all the other FX5900 benchmarks where Nvidia had a steady 20 to 30% lead on ATI? This article was posted before the FX cards were released, Nvidia's not trying to "SNEAK" anything by us here. "The primary goal of any benchmark is to arm the consumer with the right information to make the best possible purchase decision. As the gamers' benchmark, 3DMark 03 must emulate as closely as possible the kind of experience that the gaming enthusiast will expect on their machine. It must exercise graphics hardware in the same manner that consumer games will. The graphics features, rendering paths, and effects must all emulate games, or the consumer will be misinformed and their expectations misguided. 3DMark 03 combines custom artwork with a custom rendering engine that creates a set of demo scenes that, while pretty, have very little to do with actual games. It is much better termed a demo than a benchmark. The examples included in this report illustrate that 3DMark 03 does not represent games, can never be used as a stand-in for games, and should not be used as a gamers' benchmark. The ultimate injury to the consumer of such a benchmark is three-fold. First, of course, the consumer is misguided. A purchase decision based on ineffectual data will lead consumers to wrong conclusions. Second, it causes graphics hardware manufacturers to focus attention and engineering resources on optimizing for artificially fabricated cases that are a-typical of games. Such optimizations generally do nothing to improve real game performance, and provide no benefit to the consumer. Finally, the extra engineering effort focused on such benchmarks reduces the effort available for activities beneficial to consumers--improving the actual gaming experience." http://www6.tomshardware.com/column/20030219/index .html