Dear PCF, In the February 1997 issue of PCFormat you replied to my email about complaining about the accuracy of your 3D cards review in the December 1996 issue. Congratulations on a cheap reply. Your 'stunt' of completely ignoring the main criticisms I made, instead picking up (incorrectly) on one point made was as a worse piece of objective cheap journalism than your subjective 3D accelerator review Dec 96. You said you only found one article from myself about your review in the comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video newsgroup. Maybe you are as incompetent at using a news browser as you are at reviews? With just 5 minutes of looking through postings around Dec 96/Jan 1996 from the comp.sys.ibm-pc.hardware.video newsgroup I found around 8 posts complaining about the standard of your review. More than just little ol' me eh? (see my web www.markbz.demon.co.uk for a list of postings with email addresses, dates etc I found easily). I am sure if you look through www.dejanews.com you could find more. No-one actually came back to defend PCFormat in any of those postings (on a newsgroup like this this is a sign most don't disagree, any slight error and someone will jump on there to correct you). Also I know for a fact you received at least three letters of complaint as people posted their complaint emails on the same group at the time (again see my web page too). It is easy in a magazine to post smug one liners to a small snippet from a letter without replying to the actual points raised and ignore all the points and facts I and others put up against your poor review. Here's one fact you left out. I mentioned that in your article you said the 3DFX could only do 640x480 - I pointed out this was untrue as it can also do 800x600 (example: see Mechwarrior2 for 3DFX). You also critised the Orchid Righteous for having no support for gamepads - only ONE card did and that was the Diamond EDGE. Also gamepads work fine with Tomb Raider for 3DFX so why the criticism aimed solely at the voodoo card? On another very interesting PowerVR point .. If you rename the Direct 3D benchmark program main EXE file and then run it the PowerVR's benchmarks drop dramatically! They drop to half the speed as the D3D driver for PowerVR was programmed to look for D3DTEST.EXE (have a look with a hex editor) and use some extra tricks to produce better results- that's called misleading the public -there was no posting before the fact warning people (like the press for instance). There's no mention of any jury rigging on their web site. How about printing this fact? Of course not it might affect any possible dealings between PowerVR and PCFormat? There really are plenty of posting confirming this but for some proof I also have a response (on the same newsgroup you dismissed so easily) from PowerVR rep Simon Fenney trying to justify this act - see re-post below just in case you have more news browser problems... In response to Jim Husband he admitted the PowerVR was 'hacked' by them to check for D3DTEST.EXE being run ! Here's a quote: Date: Thu, 02 Jan 1997 12:31:11 -0600 From: Simon Fenney Subject: Re: Power VR does sound really good. Is it ? Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.video Message-ID: <852228185.13778@dejanews.com> In article <32cbc9fc.16390178@news.airmail.net>, jimhus@airmail.net (Jim Husband) wrote: JM> I was impressed also. However, at this time, I won't consider JM> the card. My primary reason relates to the benchmark numbers JM> (which look so impressive). They are at least questionable - and JM> I'd say they're JM> are simply misleading. JM> From what I've heard here (none of this is first hand) - their JM> D3DTest benchmarks will lower if you rename the executable. I JM> believe the explanation was along the lines of: there were some JM> performance options JM> that could be set in D3DTest - that other games did not handle properly. JM> These options are "turned on" is JM> the executable happens to be named D3DTest.exe. JM> These "optimizations" cannot be used with games currently JM> available without serious video flaws. Apparently renaming a JM> game to D3DTest.exe made it run faster - with an unplayable JM> picture. SF> In fact we had a bug in that early version of the driver. Comdex SF> was looming and it turned out that the bug in the optimisation didn't SF> affect D3DTest so the SW guy was SF> told to "hack it" so that it was only enabled for that program. SF> It's since been fixed and so should be available to all apps. SF> Simon Sure but the driver hack DOES affect the D3DTEST (like doubling it's benchmark). How about an OBJECTIVE discussion on that problem in your pages?