I get the feeling things are about to get extremely controversial on this card...

Quote Originally Posted by HardOCP
(Editor's Note: You will see here today that our evaluation of the gaming performance produced by this video card does not track with some other big sites on the Web, and the simple fact is that those sites did not measure "gaming performance." Those sites measured frames per second performance in canned benchmarks and even some of them went as far as to use cut scenes from games to pull their data from. I have been part of this industry for years now and we are seeing now more than ever where real world gaming performance and gaming "benchmarks" are not coming to the same conclusions. Remember that when we evaluate video cards, we use them exactly the way you would use them. We play games on them and collect our data.

Another thing to think about is this. Do game developers want to provide built in benchmarks that show their games running slow? Or would the game developers rather put a game "benchmark" in that shows their game hauling ass? Do you think that slow benchmarks equal more sales?

The "3dfx way" of evaluating video cards is DEAD. It did have its time and place, but we are beyond that now. Any person using those methods to influence your video card purchase is likely irresponsible in doing so. You might even consider them liable. And I think that is going to come bubbling to the surface more and more as the industry matures. )
Look thru the discussion about the review, you'll see people attacking them left and right, mainly pointing out the Anandtech review, which after reading thru you notice they use demos/flybys/cutscenes to bench. For call of duty 4 Anandtech used the cutscene of the guy smoking a cigar for their numbers, this doesn't even test the performance of really any of the engines effects(explosions, gunshots, etc)... [H] also explain the reason they do things the way they do, and that's because of the FX series benchmark scores compared to what it was capable of in gaming itself.

Kinda makes me think it's time someone does a "benchmark vs real-world gameplay" review, merely to show if [H] has been full of it the past few years or if they've been right for quite some time. I personally haven't given [H] too much thought before, but they might just be on to something here.

Personally, I'm not taking sides until we see how this pans out. Either way, even if it took 2 gpus to do it, atleast ATi are finally making their way back into the fight. Hopefully it can compete with it's real competition!