A recent press release and benchmark from NVidia won them the title of “world’s most powerful mobile GPU setup”. They pitted their Alienware M17X, which contains dual GTX280M’s in SLI, against the Asus W90, powered by dual AMD4870’s in Crossfire. The NVidia/Alienware system won easily. However, new information has come up that has people wondering if perhaps the race should have been a bit closer, or perhaps NVidia should have lost:
To prove their point nVidia tested both systems and when setting up the Asus they stated that they used the “latest drivers”. However it appears that this is far from the truth and the drivers are more than one year old, hardly utilizing the second 4870 at all. It is unclear if nVidia did this to provide a larger, more impressive lead than they already had in the benchmark or if they had to do this to come out on top.
A year in the age of Video drivers is ancient history, and NVidia should know better (#1 rule in every NVidia troubleshooting howto is “Check your driver version”).
Update: Be sure to read the followup to these allegations that places most of the blame on ASUS.
via nVidia alter benchmarks for Fastest Mobile GPU Crown | eTeknix.com.
