[DreamerX]

an interesting story about the BIG performance gain from the G41 optimized driver. True or cheat? judge it by yourself.

report by:
- Techreport
- the Inquirer

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[wwenze]

Before DX7, T&L was done by CPU.

[power666]

Cheat. ATI did something similar about a decade ago with Quake 3 and the Radeon 8500. Literally changing the executable name was enough to alter performance due to how the driver detected the game just like the new Intel examples.

Not that nVidia is much better with their 3Dmark optimizations for the Geforce FX line.

[Thepath]

No, it is not a cheat

From Intel:
"We have engineered intelligence into our 4 series graphics driver such that when a workload saturates graphics engine with pixel and vertex processing, the CPU can assist with DX10 geometry processing to enhance overall performance. 3DMarkVantage is one of those workloads, as are Call of Juarez, Crysis, Lost Planet: Extreme Conditions, and Company of Heroes."

And apparently it boosted crysis FPS by 50% without hurting image quality...
Intel graphics drivers employ questionable 3DMark Vantage optimizations - The Tech Report - Page 2

Those optimization do improve performance in some games, not 3Dmark only

Intel is allowing its CPU to assist its IGP. I fail to see how this is a cheat. And who cares about 3Dmark scores anyway. The true benchmarks are when they actually run in games;the number of fps and the graphical quality.

[Thepath]

Originally Posted by power666

Cheat. ATI did something similar about a decade ago with Quake 3 and the Radeon 8500. Literally changing the executable name was enough to alter performance due to how the driver detected the game just like the new Intel examples.

What ATI did is not exactly the same thing as Intel

ATI did improve performance in Quake 3 by reducing the image Quality

Intel improved its IGP performance by optimization (by allowing the CPU to help the IGP), without hurting image quality

I don't see anything wrong with what Intel did

[haylui]

if the software is used to evaluate the performance of particular hardware, then this is cheating! because with such a complicated boost from the hardware developer, it is no way to compare an apple(or orange) to other apples(oranges).

[NerosDevil]

Intel silently agree that their IGP sucks ass.

[power666]

Originally Posted by Thepath

Intel improved its IGP performance by optimization (by allowing the CPU to help the IGP), without hurting image quality

I don't see anything wrong with what Intel did

Then why not integrate that optimization into the drivers universally so that every game benefits and not those used mainly for benchmarking? Developers need to be able to trust the drivers to continually be able to produce the same result (image quality) at the same cost (performance) for a given function on the same hardware.

This also illustrates the trade off here and why it is a cheat: increased GPU performance at the cost of reduced CPU performance. Actual game performance would likely suffer due to hitting a CPU bottleneck if this was enabled for everything. Hence why Intel applies this cheat to select benchmarks where they know ahead of time that CPU utilization is generally low to begin with.

[lennardseah]

i want ati/nvidia to make use of my extra cpu cycles too especially when the game is only single threaded!

[Cryptyc]

Originally Posted by power666

Developers need to be able to trust the drivers to continually be able to produce the same result (image quality) at the same cost (performance) for a given function on the same hardware.

Given the myriad different possible settings and other software that may be present on the system that could affect the performance of any given function, I doubt any developer would code a game believing that they can trust drivers to produce the same result at the same cost. It certainly often doesn't hold true from version to version of drivers from the same company.

This also illustrates the trade off here and why it is a cheat: increased GPU performance at the cost of reduced CPU performance. Actual game performance would likely suffer due to hitting a CPU bottleneck if this was enabled for everything. Hence why Intel applies this cheat to select benchmarks where they know ahead of time that CPU utilization is generally low to begin with.

Although Intel is likely to be lying about the "built in intelligence" since the optimization appears to rely on INF details and treading close to the line by this cherry picking, IMO it doesn't really qualify as cheating. This is because the users do get real benefits in some actual games without losing image quality. Using your words, they get the same result (image quality) using less cost (performance).

Of course like you mentioned, these optimization won't work for many other games but it does help where the CPU isn't the bottleneck. A pity that Intel appeared only to bothered to check the "popular" games to see which ones can benefit from this and thus included only them in the optimization.