If you've thought that such a serious jab as the one NVIDIA threw AMD's way a while ago (with benchmark cheating claims involved) was not going to have any repercussions, then think again, since we're witnessing somewhat of a “driver cheating pinpointing” competition between the two GPU manufacturers.
As a quick backgrounder, NVIDIA accused AMD of actually decreasing in-game image quality via its Catalyst 10.10 drivers in order to obtain better benchmark performances, and did so in an extremely harsh manner, while also employing the help of several well-known hardware review sites.
AMD's response to these accusations wasn't exactly particularly technical, but did rebuff NVIDIA's claims regarding the alleged cheating.
And now, according to a report by the Hardware Canucks, AMD's doing its own accusations, providing evidence suggesting that NVIDIA's no stranger from such practices either.
AMD claims that in HAWX (a part of the NVIDIA “The Way It’s Meant to Be Played” collection), when someone renames the “HAWX.exe” executable file to “hacks.exe” (or probably just about any other name, apart from the original one), the image quality actually improves when using GTX 500 series cards, affecting frame rates by as much as 8%.
Of course, NVIDIA's Nick Stam (the guy behind the Anti-AMD post on NVIDIA's nTersect blog) also has a very detailed and technical explanation for this whole problem, apparently pertaining to a bug within HawX pertaining to anti-aliasing that had to be fixed via a driver using an application specific profile.
Mr. Stam also says that the aforementioned .exe file renaming leads to the driver fix being ignored by the game, and hence the problems described by AMD ensue.
Leaving aside all of the technical details, we can't help but notice that the war between AMD and NVIDIA is slowly, but surely going into a direction that's not particularly flattering for either companies, albeit the general public will certainly benefit from it, since we'll get to see plenty of “dirty laundry” being brought into the light by both parties involved.
