Sure there are plenty of ways to transform data and produce the same final image. I don't have a problem with a company optimizing drivers in this way; it's a valid way to get the most performance out of their hardware. That seems to be what ATI did in the 3dmark03 demo. But it is pretty clear that what NVIDIA did was something different: they changed the output to get better scores.
What would happen if I were testing heatsinks and told you that a $10 aluminum oem cooler was just as good as an Alpha PAL 8045? Well you probably wouldnt believe me, so I would post complete timestamped temperature logs from my diode reader. Ok why spend more money on the Alpha then right? Well what if it turned out that I neglected to mention that I was running the CPU at 2V and 2.5 GHz on the alpha and at 1.47 and 1.5V on the oem? That bit of info might have influenced your buying decision right? Same sort of deal. The performance values are inflated by doing shady things whose only purpose were to mislead.
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