Statement of Massive Development regarding AquaMark3 /
IHV cooperation & cheating attempts. As a developer of interactive high-end
3D gaming applications and benchmarks we obviously have to collect in-depth
Know-How about a specific hardware from it's manufacturer. This type of
cooperation is common practice for all major developers. It serves the sole
purpose to utilize the latest technologies in the correct way and thus
giving the customer the best gaming and performance experience possible.
You may decide to support a specific hardware platform or a specific
hardware feature by a game application. However this not an option for any
serious benchmarking application. While developing AquaMark3 we take
precautions in a way so that all IHV's (Independent Hardware Vendors) with a
vital interest in AquaMark3 are treated equally. So there is no reason for
those vendors to conduct any cheating attempts on AquaMark3.
Once a benchmark is released there are obviously multiple possibilities to
cheat its results (both for any IHV and any user). We took precautions to
prevent and detect cheating attempts in this post release phase and during
the lifetime of AquaMark3. Unfortunately we can not prevent this in all
cases by the application itself. The most powerful anti cheating tool will
be the AquaMark Result Comparator (ARC), the online database and the
AquaMark3 forum. We will immediately inform all customers about our
evaluation of the latest cheating attempts (if they should happen).
As a developer of high end 3D gaming applications we will of course be very
specific and accurate when we have to judge if a specific optimization is of
general interest or if it only targets AquaMark3 in a questionable way. We
are always open to discuss our policy with interested users in this forum.
Alexander Jorias / Managing Director Massive Development Ingo Frick /
Technical Director Massive Development Firstly I am hugely impressed with a
MD taking the effort to spell out the position of your company and honesty
and openness in benchmarks across hardware vendors - its a complex task to
compare cards designed towards Open standard 3d API's and cards that utilise
significant extensions to the API's to achieve competitiveness.
I was very interest in your comment above, because in a few places (noteably
Beyond3D) it is postulated that heavy use of high colour precision shaders
can half Nvidia's NV3x performance relative to using an abundance of low
colour precision shaders. So where between a game and a benchmark is a
reasonable limit for the use of high precision shaders before its treated as
a "feature" that is being supported? I recall reading that NVidia's Dawn
technical demo only used fp32 for her eyes. Forcing the demo to run entirely
in fp32 mode brought performance down by around 45% across a range of
resolutions.
Has Massive Development encountered this trend and what do you feel is an
acceptable level of high color precision in your pixel shaders - for both a
game and a benchmark? Is a game that allows 20% high color precision fair
whilst a benchmark that only allows 5% maximum of any screen to demand high
color precision unfair?
Our very last day we fished an area southwest of the lodge that guide Thomas
called the "Lagoons." This area had huge flats; most of them almost
completely surrounded by forests of mangroves. As the tide dropped and the
sun burned strong from a very clear sky, the bones got spookier and
spookier. I had retreated to a 16-foot leader tipped with eight-pound
fluorocarbon and a very sparse number six Crystal Charlie. We caught quite a
number of bones that day. Finally Thomas announced we'd better leave or
there wouldn't have enough water to get off the flat. He also said he knew a
flat on the way home that sometimes held schools of permit. I knew he was
just saying that to ease that slightly empty feeling you always get on the
last flat of the last day.
But he did stop on the way home and almost immediately a healthy school of
permit showed up. They all ignored several "perfect" presentations of the
obligatory, now small, crab pattern. But they didn't spook . . . until I
tied on a chartreuse and white Clouser and shot that over their heads.
"I never saw so many permit go in so many directions, so fast!" said Kent,
"Those guys blew up before that Clouser even hit the water."
"Yup lined them, but wasn't it exciting?"
After that fun encounter, it really was time to go on home. I reluctantly
stepped down from the front platform and started winding in flyline. Then,
talk about luck.
"Senor Hugh, don't sit down yet. Look out there at about ten o'clock."
Another school pushed up on this flat. Thomas had been telling us all every
day that a person had caught a permit on a small Charlie here in this area.
After all those permit doing their "permit thing" with traditional permit
flies, finally the light came on! His English and our Spanish, though
English is the primary language in Belize, left us thinking "a person," when
in fact he meant PEOPLE. "People catch permit all the time around here on
small bonefish flies!"
A person could be an accident, people means a pattern. Down went the ten
weight. Up came the eight, with the sixteen foot eight pound tippet and
number six Crystal Charlie. On about the third cast to this second school,
the four pounder described earlier, fast to the sparse Crystal Charley
ripped left, right and deep. We even took another one, of about three pounds
a few minutes later! Two permit in the last hour of our last day in Belize!
Though small they were both certainly big fun!
