Nvidia cheats on 3DMark with 177.39 drivers

This means two things, when you are running 3DMark Vantage with the 177.39 drivers, you are not doing the same work as every other driver running 3DMark Vantage. You are doing a completely different workload on 25 per cent of the tests. To rub salt into the wound, Nvidia then tells you that the Extreme preset, the one meant for high-end GPUs, doesn't show off the cheat sufficiently, so use one that weights it more heavily. What gall.

The end result is about a 10n per cent increase in scores, and a claimed 7.5x advantage on the physics subtest. You can see how they word it for yourself.



If the glove doesn't fit, you must acquit.

If you look at it as a whole, Nvidia is doing two things, first of all doing a different workload than the rest of the world and claiming it is the same, and second not following the Futuremark rules. This is nothing less than blatant dishonesty.

We asked Futuremark for a comment, and they referred us to the above Driver Approval Policy, and then to the approved driver page here.

Nvidia has not submitted 177.39 for approval, and likely will never do so because the chance of it being approved are something between zero and having to buy Futuremark. Until they submit a bad driver, no harm, no foul. The Futuremark policy is that if it isn't up on ORB, it isn't a 3DMark score, and that is quite sensible.

Nvidia engineers know that there is no way they can get this driver approved, so they don't try. They know they are not running 3DMark, but they don't even try to hide it. They are however disingenuously doing a different workload and trying to cynically pass it off as the same old workload. There is a word for this behavior, cheating. µ

Note: At time of this writing, the ATI Catalyst 8.6 drivers are not approved yet, the latest valid set is 8.5. Nvidia's latest approved is 175.16, and Intel isn't even submitting a set, it seems they don't want the world to know something. In any case, this does not preclude all three companies from quoting scores liberally with unapproved drivers.

Bad industry, no cookies for you.

Reviewers take note.