Hawgdog,
Read this second paragraph again:
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"According to ATI's representative quoted by Beyond3D in their editorial over here, the 1.9% performance gain came from optimization of the two DirectX 9.0 shaders (water and sky) in Game Test 4. ATI rendered the scene exactly as intended by Futuremark, in full-precision floating point. Their shaders were mathematically and functionally identical to Futuremark's and there were no visual artifacts; according to ATI Technologies, the company simply shuffled instructions to take advantage of their architecture. ATI states that these were exactly the sort of optimizations that work in games to improve frame rates without reducing image quality and as such, were a realistic approach to a benchmark intended to measure in-game performance. However, ATI recognized that these can be used by some people to call into question the legitimacy of the benchmark results, and so they would remove them from their driver as soon as is physically possible. They expect them to be gone by the next release of CATALYST. "
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This was after Nvidia was caught not rendering the scenes properly outside the rails of the scene. Nvidia had in the vicinity of a 20% cheat in their drivers specifically designed for this benchmark.
The only reason ATI said anything about this "optimization" was to be straight up that with enough digging someone could accuse them of the same thing. Even though it was not even remotely the same thing. ATI even went on to say that they will be removing the optimization even though futuremark said what they did was exactly what they expect drivers to do for better gameplay without the loss of image quality.
You should use a benchmark from the games you play anyway. These are synthetic benchmarks and do not give a reliable outlook on overall playability and image quality of actual games.
PF-Coastie
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