i would like tpo point out that the underdog is better motivated to win, so well see . ..

yea if I was nvidia i'd be pretty pissed off.. and as far as I can tell they are (and I like that in a card maker.. until they get unethical about it)

nvidia is doing fine... besides... they were raking in the dough back then from the ti gf 4 series, gf2, gf3, and even the gf 1..... i have a feeling their next line of cards will prosper nicely...

The only major allegation against nVidia was for the last generation of cards, the first FX's. As Jason said, it turned out that ATi had been doing the same exact thing, and yet they didn't get such a bad rap and aren't the ones thought of immediately when the topic comes up because they weren't the ones caught first.

Now, in my opinion, this "cheating" isn't at all a bad thing on the part of either company. The drivers are developed so that the benchmarks use the hardware in their most efficient manner. The reason I don't feel this is bad, and actually a good thing, is so that we can see how the hardware itself performs, and not how it performs under a specific version of some software. When DX gets optimized with a 9.0b or c , perhaps, you will already know which card is faster because the unoptimized software isn't the bottleneck in those results, the hardware is. And isn't that what we are trying to compare after all?

i have a tendency to agree with vee_ess. it's better to test the maximum level rather than some random range in the upper middle. on the other hand, if corners are being cut so that the hardware is just not performing the test, then that's not good. It's like a runner running half the race and saying he won b/c he stopped running first. well, he didn't run the whole race.