Intel IGPs Use Murky Optimisations for 3DMark Vantage

Apart from being the industry's leading 3D graphics benchmark application, 3DMark has had a long history of 3D graphics hardware manufacturers cheating with their hardware using application-specific optimisations against Futuremark's guidelines to boost 3DMark scores. Often, this is done by drivers detecting the 3DMark executable, and downgrading image quality, so the graphics processor has to handle lesser amount of processing load from the application, and end up with a higher performance score. Time and again, similar application-specific optimisations have tarnished 3DMark's credibility as an industry-wide benchmark. This time around, it's neither of the two graphics giants in the news for the wrong reasons, it's Intel. Although the company has a wide consumer base of integrated graphics, perhaps the discerning media user / very-casual gamer finds it best to opt for integrated graphics (IGP) solutions from NVIDIA or AMD. Such choices rely upon reviews evaluating the IGPs performance at accelerating video (where it's common knowledge that Intel's IGPs rely heavily on the CPU for smooth video playback, while competing IGPs fare better at hardware-acceleration), synthetic and real-world 3D benchmarks, among other application-specific tests.

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Tags: gps tegra 3dmark