Wow I never thought of this before but now you mentioned it. Maybe. That kind of sucks if it's true...

Nvidia does it all the time. They keep on saying "its cooler and quieter" LOL HAVE anyone of you owned an nivdia product before? they ARE NOT! cool or quite!

Ofcourse they do, they just call it optomising. However if it's with a real world benchmark it dosn't matter. They do it with specs all the time to make components seem faster than they are.

If we apply the word "cheat" as it is meant to be it means "to influence or lead by deceit, trick, or artifice". Which leaves me to come to the conclusion that they arent cheating, but that as many things are a truth with reservation. Of course they want to get "their" product to seem like the best but if by going on that definition don't that make all advertising cheating. I can agree that the companies tweek the results to their favour but I believe most times you cant call that cheating as they tell you the exact mothod of the benchmarks. And in having a monopoly there is no cheating. Yes, they aren't nice but then again the companies are made to make money, not to be nice to us.

Further more if you who are telling everyone about Nvidia tell us that ATI are cheating and such things, think about this who gains if the opposite company get bad rep. Seriously dont just go believing everything just couse a "BIG NAME" says it, it might be right, but it just as much might be that company trying to badmouth the first.

But to answer the given question once and for all:
No they dont!
( Please dont mark my words and tell me that and that company did, Yeah there exists those that outright cheat but I don't belive that most do it that way )

P.S. Please not that this is my opinion and not in any way do I tell anyone to think like I do but if you want you are welcome to express your disapproval by pointing any faults or shortcomings in my arguments.

I dont care if they cheat because with all the video reviews in recent years it no longer matters as people no longer go by a single review.

NVIDIA was blaming AMD for cheating in GPU results, isn't AMD a good brand name company? Yeah right.. I believe NVIDIA :P

P.S. Is this why you made this poll? Results will be interesting.

I think they cheat when they say things like USB speeds full speed of 480meg sec i think but i have never had a USB2 drive work at them speeds

They cheat quite a bit in Harddrives. For example, I recently bought a 640GB external HD, but when it was connected to the computer, it only reads around 590GB. I wonder where the other 50GB go?

I believe cheating exist, can't prove how but yes - Hey! You're wearing my shirt! >B

I think they sometimes they make a product look better than it really is, but still there are a lot of companies making great products. The competition between them plays an important role in this fact and also the work they have building their products.

I don't think they cheat, but i do think they mislead, but then again i suppose it's the same thing.

we as consumers need to be on the ball here, not only is it the companies BUT it's also the reviewers too who "cheat" it all depends where the money is coming from. BUT I do find that 3D gameman to be mostly non biased.

i Think people need to stop being fooled With BIG numbers like my new gpu give 400fps etc etc And start doing some research to find out what the real life performance is of the product they want to buy.

Not some jumped up result based on the latest i7 extreme or Amd phenom x6 etc.

A good benchmark would be How do we as an average user benifit from your new product?? WITHOUT changing EVERYTHING in my PC to suit your new product??.

the best example is intel they black mailed other companies probably changed there results a little so they look better (like whit the Hyper-threading it only increases performance by 20% and sometimes decreases it but they say yea we got 8 cores)k i also think that amd tweaks some of its performance a bit in reviews like whit the hd 6870 whit more stream processors. and nvidia of course they just say ah our tdp is 300 but you can unlock it to get the full potential power whit 350tdp. autocad sets its own software on tpb so architect can download it and the architects will like it and they ask there bosses to buy this program so i say all the time they cheat

apple is cheating all the time ;)

Wherever they can cheat they will if they think they can get away with it. In the case of the recent IE9 benchmarks cheating, Windows is Microsoft's product and they may even have some code in one of the thousands of dll files that allow them to do something better for their products.

However, misleading consumers is never a good thing.

Nvidia cheats...They buying games but ATI is crashing them :).

They most definatly cheat with drivers/benchmark/specs.
I have a feeling this poll is has something to do with the new IE9 benchmarks.
Hardware vendors mostly cheat with battery life (notebooks, cellphones etc) but also with other specs.
Both ATI/AMD and Nvidia are known to make application specific "optimizations" which is both good and bad. Locking software like Physx so you aren't able to run an AMD+Nvidia combo gives bad rep, but that doesn't seem to bother Nvidia.
Pressuring companies to only buy their products(Intel) is bad rep too.

I feel like they do cheat ,but sometimes it isnt noticable... Microsoft cheats their customers paychecks....

PhysX in Vantage is a good example.

its probably like they do with food, they put stuff onto the food to make it look better in video and photo, but you wouldnt be able to cause its mostly toxic

They definitely ''cheat'' on benchmarking result, they have done this since forever. Then again it's not really cheating, a lot of the times they use benchmarks that show their card performs better in a certain piece of software, kind of like how Nvidia uses Heaven all the time, it's because their current line of cards perform like gods in tessellation benchmarks and they know AMD lags in that aspect, so they exploit it to their advantage.

From what I've seen in NDA protected rooms and what they later presented to the public, I would say yes. There are companies that only make results look a little better and those that actually forget to mention that certain features will not be available because the software is not yet ready.
To be honest, I do not care much about most of those "cheats" because all those benchmarks have little to none meaning in the real world. I mean playing games at certain framrates is just without a point unless you have a fast enough display to actually show them and to my knowledge there aren't any available at a reasonable price.

I do, Microsoft said Windows 7 was good but its actually really bad.

Hardwareissue+Softwareissue is not all in 1 Issue the same.
I want to say ,that Result of that what you want ,is often not the same what you got at the End.Sometimes it is a Kickarseproduct ,sometimes the other Direction.Like a Women,yep,i will give my Computer next Time a Girlname o_0
Yep i think Women cheat too.Sometimes they know it ,othertime they didn`t.At least most of the Concern think about effectiviness.

Greetz.
Ch33t4h

They do Cheat! According to NVIDIA, AMD is playing a little trick on you. In an extensive blog post on the company's website, Technical Marketing Director Nick Stam explained that Catalyst drivers were sneakily sacrificing image quality to gain a performance advantage over GeForce GPUs.

The post highlights the findings of a number of German websites that found a discrepancy in the texture filtering settings of the recently released Catalyst 10.10 drivers with HD 5800 and HD 6800-series GPUs. Apparently, this update reduced the default settings for Catalyst AI Mipmap detail level from 'High' to 'Quality', resulting in a significant degradation in visual fidelity. In fact, only manually returning the setting to high would match the quality produced by NVIDIA's drivers at default settings.

The result in terms of performance is that AMD cards will gain an approximate ten per cent advantage by using the lower quality texture-filtering. Stam points out that this doesn't allow for a fair comparison between GeForce and Radeon GPUs and implies that the Catalyst driver developers are purposely cooking the books.

Dissapointing...

All them cheat. Maybe they do legally. Look intel with their monopoly on processors giving discounts to companies to use their processors but they may not assemble AMD processors.

Do cheat on the benchs giving money to the benchmakers companies to optimize the software for intel processors.

Nvidia cheats on Physx. Physx only run on Nvidia & they not want to optimize to AMD (ATi) products. Nvidia pays to games developers to optimize the games on Nvidia cards. Ati do it on some games but Nvidia has the major part.

Software cheats too. So cheat its anywhere

Of course companies cheat. I just think about the new Internet Explorer and their special benchmark program on which - surprisingly - the IE 9 is at the top of the leaderboard. The next is Firefox, last ones are the WebKit browsers.
Another example is nvidia. They said their 400 series is up to 30 times faster than the 5000 series by ATI. They were up to 30% faster but only in the benchmarks with heavy tesselation. Which game does use tesselation that much? So far you can't count them on one hand. Till games will use tesselation much more there will be two or three new video card series be out there...

benchmarks are B.S. what good is a $800 graphics card that has a max frame rate of 5000fps but suffers a regular drop to around 15fps

I would rather have $200 a card that will max out at 60fps and never drop below 30fps

Yes they do, but legally.

Nvidia and Intel use 3d mark and similar benchmarking software's to tune there processors so they get high results, they have openly admitted this.

But this doesn't always mean they will perform as well in other real life scenarios.

As an example the 3d mark score is increased majorly by using physx but in real life situations this would not be the case it would only add unnecessary effects to supported games, that may I add could very easily be calculated by the CPU.

cheating is not only a problem of hard- or software companies! all of them are cheating

marketing is marketing , you can call it cheating or lie-ing if you want , it is the same thing .

YOU CHEAT BY MAKING PEOPLE COME TO YOUR CRAP SITE TO COMMENT ON THIS VIDEO ON EVERY VIDEO.
done.

Maybe, but I'm not sure it seems like the gpu's are not really having big changes such as using the same pcb

some companies cheat, some dont.
like say apple...
they charge a fortune for their computers and for the same price you can get somehting three times better.

(sorry last post made no sense)

some companies cheat, some dont.
like say apple...
they charge a fortune for their computers and for the same price you can get somehting just as fast for like a third of the price if its a windows computer.

I think they cheat, but in another way. Software/game developers do not optimize their games well, so that you need to buy newer/better hardware. Shame on them!

Benchmarking has always been a rigged game.

Well I think they do cheat some of the time, but not always. A prime example of this is probably how Unigine greatly favors Nvidia cards even though cards from both companies are pretty comparable when you look at fps levels in games. This is why I always look to see how hardware works with real world gaming in addition to looking at benchmark programs.

Well I think they do cheat some of the time, but not always. A prime example of this is probably how Unigine greatly favors Nvidia cards even though cards from both companies are pretty comparable when you look at fps levels in games. This is why I always look to see how hardware works with real world gaming in addition to looking at benchmark programs.

well depends, some cheat a lot, some just a little and some dont at all.
of course i would like that none of then cheat but what can we do?
wait for rodney to review :D

Besides the big brands like Apple, Intel, Nvidia, AMD etc. Almost every company cheats in one form or another, fudging results, and tweaking their product. It's like how burgers on McDonalds ads look 3 times bigger than what they actually are.

I think most 'legitimate' and respectable companies don't cheat or do it very little, nothing you can really do about it anyways if some do it alot =P

Rodney can you do a poll about new gaming again or tesselation please?