Two weeks ago, Futuremark accused Nvidia of programming its drivers for the GeForce FX 5900 to cheat in the 3DMark 03 benchmark test, and in response it released a patch for the test to circumvent these driver features. The company has since talked to Nvidia in more depth and has changed its mind on the issue. Futuremark today released a joint statement with Nvidia, which said that "Futuremark now has a deeper understanding of the situation and Nvidia's optimization strategy. In the light of this, Futuremark now states that Nvidia's driver design is an application-specific optimization and not a cheat."

　　The statement reflects on the fact that CPU benchmarks, such as Futuremark's own PCMark2002, are allowed to run differently for Athlon XP and Pentium 4 processors to take advantages of the different features on the chips. While 3DMark 03 was designed as an "unoptimized DirectX test" that runs the same way on comparable hardware from different manufacturers, Futuremark said that recent developments in the graphics industry might require a different approach, one that integrates optimizations for specific hardware directly into the test.

　　As for Nvidia, the graphics company has long worked with many game developers to improve the performance of specific games on Nvidia hardware. In its part of the joint statement, the company said that it would have also preferred to see this approach in 3DMark 03.

　　The announcement closed by saying that "Both Nvidia and Futuremark want to define clear rules with the industry about how benchmarks should be developed and how they should be used. We believe that common rules will prevent these types of unfortunate situations moving forward." However, there is no mention of whether Nvidia will rejoin Futuremark's beta program. When the optimization controversy first began, Nvidia said that it couldn't verify or deal with certain 3DMark 03 issues because the company had left the beta program due to its price.