Originally posted by Hilbert Hagedoom
[size=large]Editorial note on Cheats and Optimizations[/size]
A nasty trend we have seen the past months is that certain graphics chipset designers have been caught optimizing and even cheating their drivers for specific benchmarks. We want to explain a few things about the difference between the two and what Guru3d.com has been doing to prevent this grey area of cheating.
An Optimization by itself is honestly nothing bad. Take a racing car. At default it will race at a certain speed, now if we tune it, revise it and hey even switch on that Nitro button, the performance of that racing car will increase heaps. Your Operating system has been optimized for your Pentium or AMD processor to take full advantage of the CPU, the result is a faster computer.
Now we look at the graphics chipset, the two examples named above are similar for graphic processors. Games can be optimized for the graphics chipset to take advantage image quality or performance wise the frame rate. We make a very important side note though, an optimization can not and may not be made at the cost of image quality as that would be cheating.
Cheating, by definition is wrong on any level. NVIDIA has been caught red-handed clipping in specific synthetic benchmarks. A downright shameful act ...
After huge criticism from the public and a lot of mud-throwing between FutureMark and NVIDIA, NVIDIA has made steps to remove their cheating actions from their drivers which we highly recommend them to do as otherwise it would cost them their reputation and good name at consumer level. If a consumer does and can not trust a product, they will not buy it. It's that simple.
