You're wrong, Carmack did clearly state Nvidia cheated. Reread his post.
Mind posting a URL, I seem to have missed this.
This is a programmer's issue, I wished non-programmers would stop trying to do their own technical analysis.
I'm afraid I disagree, even though I program stuff. The technical question is "Has x piece of software been optimized for y application". It appears that the answer to this is unequivocably Yes.
the question "Does optimising x for y amount to a
cheat " is essentially a moral one, not a technical one. It doesn't mean that programmers can't have a view, but it also means that consumers can have a legitimate and informed view as well.
Finally, we know from JC's .plans and elsewhere that DOOM , and indeed earlier iD games, had different code paths for different hardware. It's reasonable to assume that other software companies do this as well _ I'm almost 100% sure it applies to the Unreal engine for example. This isn't cheating in my book. So when we then come to benchmarks which have as a stated aim to indicate how current applications will perform on different hardware do we subject all hardware to the same code and see how it works best, or do we allow each software provider to optimise their offering in the same way as development companies would. How you answer this question determines wether you think NVIDIA "cheated", but bothe answers are perfectly reasonable.
Anvil
Anvil - from the land of warm beer and mad cattle.