Last week, Futuremark, creator of the popular 3DMark-series of graphical benchmarking software, issued a patch for its latest flagship suite 3DMark03 along with a verbal blast aimed firmly at Nvidia. Futuremark basically accused Nvidia of using surreptitious means to artificially inflate its score.

At issue were Nvidia's latest Detonator reference drivers, version 44.03. The tech enthusiast site ExtremeTech had previously brought the issue to light with an article published on 14th May. It concluded that Nvidia was cutting corners in its drivers, essentially making its cards do less work in 3DMark03 to boost its score, and from this Futuremark initiated its own investigation, with the results and 3DMark03 patch published on the 23rd May.

Among Futuremark's findings were:

Several pixel and vertex shader effects in 3DMark03 are discarded by Nvidia's drivers and replaced by its own (more efficient and heavily-optimised for their GPUs) shaders.

Sometimes an instruction by 3DMark03 to clear the back buffer was ignored at the driver level, specifically to increase performance.

Custom clip planes were used to reduce the workload on their GPUs, thereby again artificially inflating the score.

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