Quote Originally Posted by Katzenschleuder View Post
WTF are you talking about? The relative performance is off by more than 50% in some cases and by more than 20% in most cases.
Don't you think that a difference of 50% in performance would have a "slight" impact on your graphics card purchase decision?
That's the magnitude of difference between them. They still have the same ranking on the chart, except for the single obvious outlier. They were even using different drivers between the cards within brands (ie. reusing old scores). Basically ATI cards smashed NV cards in vantage and they smashed them in Shattered Horizon too.

There was also NEVER a Catalyst release that improved performance of Shattered Horrizon, but only one fix for a graphics bug.

So how in hell is this not a prime example that 3DMark is a horrible thing to use to compare performance?
I don't remember ever seeing much in the release notes for various drivers about Shattered Horizon. But I still saw some significant changes in performance, even from minor version changes. It seems some of what they were doing to optimize Vantage also spilled over to SH, IME. I wish more review sites actually used SH for testing as it is a real game.

Anyway, it is a moot point. It seems that there really isn't much of a market for a cheap, unique, high-graphics, skill-based, pc exclusive shooter. But saying that vantage doesn't reflect actual games is, IMO, an indicator of how sucky the PC games market is and not so much how bad 3DMark is as an engine.