Is Intel Cheating for Higher 3DMark Scores?

For as long as it’s been possible to write a graphics driver in such a way that it can inflate the results of popular benchmarking applications, it’s been done. NVIDIA is one company that’s been accused of it many times in the past, most recently when it changed its driver to allow the graphics card to utilize itself for CPU purposes, which inflated the end CPU score in 3DMark Vantage to unreachable levels by modern-day processors.

But it’s not NVIDIA on the hot-seat today, but rather Intel. As investigated by our friends at The Tech Report, Intel seems to be writing specific optimizations in its driver that ends up inflating the end 3DMark Vantage score. How it’s done is that when a supported application (as in, executable) is detected, the driver shifts some of the workload over to the processor, so as to improve the overall gaming performance.

That seems like a fair method of doing things to me, because if the CPU isn’t being used, then an extra boost of performance is going to be appreciated. But the problem is that the optimization in the driver actually lists 3DMark Vantage… it’s not a general optimization. With such “trickery”, Futuremark might not approve of Intel’s latest driver for use in published benchmark results. But, despite the naysayers, Intel states that it’s very confident that Futuremark will approve the driver.

It should be noted that 3DMark isn’t the only affected application. Actual games that will see the feature include Crysis, Lost Planet and Call of Juarez. To keep this fair, Intel should really remove these “profiles” and write the driver to take advantage of this functionality whenever needed… it should be completely application-agnostic. It’s not, though, so until Futuremark gives its final word, we’ll have to just speculate as to whether or not Intel is trying to cheat the system. What do you guys think?

Intel’s software-based vertex processing scheme improves in-game frame rates by nearly 50% when Crysis.exe is detected, at least in the first level of the game we used for testing. However, even 15 FPS is a long way from what we’d consider a playable frame rate. The game doesn’t exactly look like Crysis Warhead when running at such low detail levels, either. Our Warhead results do prove that Intel’s optimization can improve performance in actual games, though—if only in this game and perhaps the handful of others identified in the driver INF file.