Counterpoint: Nvidia is just doing its job

Buy company for performance increase. Get performance increase. Win?

After the deconstruction of Nvida's latest graphics driver earlier in the week, the site's been abuzz with claims and counter-claims and rants about the same subject - is NCIDIA cheating in 3DMark?

The Green Team's new 177.39 drivers enable GPU physics in the Vantage benchmark. This means that any standard system running the physics test is running on the CPU - whereas any system with a compatible NVIDIA GPU and driver is running the physics test on the GPU, resulting in a performance increase of roughly 10x.

The arguments against this practice were pretty elegantly made - the new NVIDIA drivers aren't even running the same codebase as competing platforms, and moving a calculation from one component to another is hardly a level playing field. Not to mention the fact that these new drivers aren't Futuremark approved.

But NVIDIA has kicked back with some ranting of its own, over at HotHardware. In its defence, NVIDIA's Roy Taylor said that "The physics test simply switches from the PPU to the GPU. The workload doesn’t change at all but where it is processed in the test machine is. This doesn't change the benchmark, just which processor in your machine handles it."

And is this an unfair advantage? "The reason we bought Aegia was to enable our GPUs to provide these sorts of effects." Good point.

Taylor's core argument is: the entire point of running physics on the GPU is to enable better performance, so why complain when we do so?

That leaves out the argument that this is not a Futuremark-sanctioned driver, so to publish results with it is misleading. Taylor seems plain in admitting that this is not a sanctioned driver, and most likely NVIDIA will not be submitting it - and that, consequently, such results are merely demonstratory.

"In terms of 3DMark Vantage, if you’re interested in making a driver change and submitting that, Futuremark's BDP (Benchmark Development Plan) process has strict guidelines you must adhere to. We have followed them to a tee and this new beta driver has not been submitted for consideration."

But as far as a technology demonstration goes, it's hard to argue against the fact that processing physics on the GPU is clearly much more beneficial - from a performance point of view - than on the CPU. And in the real world, away from benchmarks and their controversies, that has to be a good thing.