Nvidia podvádí i v Beyond3d's Splinter Cell benchmark?
Dave is referring to our own custom Splinter Cell demo, which you can find here.
In the past few days, Brent of HardOCP brought to light (to Dave) something he noticed while running this demo of ours (and I do mean our demo, not actually playing the game in that level) on a GFFX 5900Ultra. This demo has an ocean in its scene (a BIG ocean) and the entire ocean surface has two ps_1_1 shaders to effect, well, an ocean's surface.
I know exactly what those two ps_1_1 shaders codes are (unfortunately I can't provide them -- Ubisoft doesn't want me to) and those codes mean that "waves/ripples" should be rendered over the entire ocean's surface. Brent noticed that there are a number of spots where there are no "waves/ripples" on his 5900Ultra using 44.03s. Dave and I have confirmed that this "anomaly" happens only on 5600 and up but not on a 5200. I can confirm that both the demo and in actual gameplay in that level do not show up any such bug on a 5200 and Dave will investigate whether the bug exists in both the demo and in the gameplay level on a 5600 and above.
Sorry if you're asking for screenshots to depict what my attempt above to describe it -- I don't think it is right to provide these and fuel speculations until we get to the bottom of what's happening.
Dany Lepage (Ubisoft) has provided a very rough comment and I don't want to quote him in its entirety except that he thinks it is "definitely a driver bug". The thing is that we're trying to figure out why this "bug" exists on NV30/31/35 and not on NV34 even with NVIDIA's Unified Driver Architecture.
As for why Dave is highly suspicious, I have found out (and told Dave) that NVIDIA has a personnel focussed solely on SplinterCell benchmarking.
More, if there is more to be revealed, when we find more concrete information. For now, just take all of the above as no more than our providing our findings as we see them. I'd like to think it's a driver bug obviously but we read the above paragraph it's natural to become suspicious given the recent issues."
