Sharkeeper- Excuse me if I'm wrong on this but my experience was 23.11 worked well with the GF4. Did you completely remove your older drivers? I had problems getting some of the betas to recognize the card but the 23.11 always worked. I hadn't heard of anyone having problems with 23.11 other than lower performance. I haven't been digging around though since the card I installed worked fine.
vss1980- I agree with all of what you said except for the
<< so called cheating >>
. I think it is a slippery slope when hardware manufacturers optimize their drivers for certain games. How much can you change before you are cheating? But I feel that ATI crossed a line and then some, with their response to the issue being a mild annoyance at being caught.
ATI's use of code that specifically looked for Quake 3 and changed so many of the game settings. The altered textures, the extremely modified mipmaping, and the fact that it made it so the user couldn't change any of it via Q3's internal setup. The last part is what really gets me, that if I were a less informed consumer I would have a poor opinion of the Q3 engine because Q3 looks so bad. Just for 10% boost in a benchmark that code would have been part of every driver release if reviewers hadn't caught on.
Its the issue of having hardware drivers remove the control from the user or the game developer, to fudge a benchmark that is to me irrelevant. I don't pay much attention to 3dmark scores because I'm sure both nvidia and ati tweak as much performance as they can for that benchmark(not to mention all the users). Real world quality and performance is much more important to me. But I have to pay some attention to benchmarks and reviews, unless I'm lucky enough to know friends with all the available cards for me to test out.
I guess what gets me most is what I judge to be a clear and willful intent to decieve me and to remove the choice of running Q3 at high quality. This along with the arrogance of ATI in interviews I read later made me quite upset.
This quote is from the original Firingsquad article that first alerted me to the whole mess and I think its very appropriate.
<< Game-specific optimizations are nothing new, and in reality, neither is "cheating" in benchmarks. Manufacturers have been "writing drivers to the benchmark" since benchmarks have been around. >>
I believe every manufacturer will "optimize" but I think we the users must set some limits in what we accept. Lines were crossed here. I also believe in discouraging such behavior as strongly as I can. I'll still buy ATI's product and recomend it to others (they have very good cards right now), but I'll remember this and think twice before I do so. Maybe I was too trusting in my faith in companies.
Memnoch