Nvidia's spin comes unspun

Nvidia uses dodgy benchmarks to 'prove' mobile graphics superiority.

Nvidia seems to have decided to get its spin on, this time with claims that its GeForce GTX 280M has helped Alienware spit out the world's "fastest laptop", the M17x.

The green machine, which reckons its 280M GTX is the world's fastest GPU - a 'fact' AMD would probably hotly contend - says Alienware has hooked up a couple of its much touted cards using SLI to create laptop speeds that are out of this world.

Lest one should dismiss the claims as a load of Nvidia pomp - something we are still rather inclined to do - the Green Goblin has drawn up its own "reviewer's guide" for the Alienware M17x, challenging cynics to see for themselves whether its claims are nothing but self-serving hype. So we took a quick look.

Nvidia said that, for the sake of comparison, it bought "the only notebook on the market which uses AMD's Mobility Radeon 4870 Crossfire" and benchmarked it against the Alienware M17x. But then the Goblin went on to say the notebook it bought for comparison, the Asus W90, was only available in one configuration and was benchmarked using Asus' "latest drivers" rather than ATI's. Well, it turns out these "latest drivers" were almost a year old and were therefore seemingly not engaging the second GPU at all. Things were already beginning to look dodgy.

No one with any sense would bother to argue that the M17x wasn't a vastly superior gaming notebook to the W90, although the W90 does have a significant overclocking record. But even from a CPU platform level, Nvidia played things a little dirty, taking its Q9300 Alienware system and comparing it to Asus' Q9000, probably hoping people wouldn't notice. But a quick check of the Asus website shows that only Intel Dual core options are available for W90 specs.

It's also worth bearing in mind that the M17x is a GDDR3 machine, as is the W90, but what will happen to Nvidia's superiority claims when an OEM produces a Mobility Radeon 4870 GDDR5 solution? Can the GTX 280M do GDDR5? We thinks not!

"As you can see in the benchmark results below, the dual GeForce GTX 280M GPUs in the Alienware M17x absolutely annihilates the ATI Crossfire configuration," sniggered Nvidia spinner Brian Burke, adding, somewhat dishonestly, "no tricks, no overclocking, just the fastest notebook GPUs on the planet."

A clear indicator that Nvidia manipulated the results can be seen from the following numbers of the green machine's 'honest' benchmarking. NV shows 3DMark06 CPU scores of 2,952 for XFIRE versus 3,554 for SLI - a clear advantage to the CPU in their test system. Then, the 3DMARKVantage CPU scores showed 7,754 for XFIRE versus 29,202 for SLI. Hmmm. Is Nvidia kidding? Talk about CPU bound.

On notebookreview.com, the W90 is benchmarked at 13,641 on 3DMark06 using a 2.8GHz Intel T9600 and at 15,628 when the CPU is overclocked to 3.29GHz, rather than the paltry scores Nvidia's benchmark seems to have dredged up. Then again, Nvidia artificially crippled the ATI system with a bad driver, comparing two of its cards to just one working ATI card, so it's hardly surprising the scores seem to suck.

NV's claims that AMD doesn't offer its drivers from its website are a little sneaky too. Most OEMs demand that firms send them the latest version of any driver released so that the computer makers have the chance to test the software before shipping it out. AMD had sent the latest version of its drivers to Asus, but for some reason, the Taiwanese firm shipped drivers that were not Catalyst 9.6, inadvertently crippling the machine during benchmark testing. Nvidia knew this but saw an opportunity to take advantage of the situation. Sad day for Nvidia's professionalism and equally sad if Nvidia believed journalists would fall for this dribble.