29 April, 2008

Optimizations

Optimizations... Adjusting the result to the natural world. To your vga card. I hate that I am fooled always. But we know it, everything is about the money.

So this world is here and it may be yours. All the same, what there is in your machine. ATI, MATROX, NVIDIA, S3... all the same. Just do not believe in the scores. We usually purchase faster and faster CPUs and graphics controllers not to get higher scores in synthetic benchmarks (like 3DMark, Aquamark etc.), but to have the best visual and general quality in real games that we are about to play for days or weeks. Certainly this does not mean that we question the reason for existence of synthetic products, but they should be used for examining a hardware’s theoretical capabilities. Getting higher scores in them must not significantly influence which product we are about to buy. Synthetic benchmarks are static. They always render the same scenes from the same angles with the same settings. So it is possible to create a device driver which gets advantage of this stativity, therefore it makes the hardware do better under these circumstances than how it could perform under real applications. Never choose a graphics controller just because it gets more scores in a well-known synthetic application.

So... welcome to the world of real benchmarks!

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