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Nvidia Corp. has rejoined FutureMark's beta program, which will be instituting a new set of guidelines to more clearly define what optimizations member companies are permitted to make.

With the decision, Nvidia now has the rights to participate in early builds of FutureMark's software, allowing the graphics company to develop optimizations for the benchmarks, if it so desires.

However, "optimizations" have been the crux of the problem between the two companies.

In February, Nvidia criticized FutureMark and its 3DMark benchmarks, claiming that users and OEMs should evaluate a chip's performance on various games and other 3D-intensive applications. Nvidia was later found to have made optimizations that left visual artifacts in the images rendered by FutureMark, which FutureMark initially called a "cheat". FutureMark later backtracked, however, as executives referred to the revised drivers as application-specific optimizations. Meanwhile, Nvidia then released WHQL-certified drivers to some of its customers that fixed the artifact problem.

To prevent a repeat of the hostilities, FutureMark executives said that they will be contacting their member companies to define a set of rules or guidelines to clearly define what latitude a graphics company has to optimize their drivers for the 3DMark benchmark.

"It's something in the works. We haven't finalized it yet," said Tero Sarkkinen, executive vice president of sales and marketing at FutureMark, in an interview. "It will be our next big thing. What we are hoping and pursuing here is that each and every player we hope will contribute to this draft and endorse it."

Sarkkinen said there was no timetable on when the draft would be published or approved. "When it's done we'll publish it," he said.

According to Sarkkinen, both Nvidia and FutureMark had several "very good talks" about optimizations. Nvidia, meanwhile, has issued statements claiming that the original FutureMark optimizations were the unsupervised work of a programmer, and the company has set down clear public guidelines over the use of such optimizations.

Sarkkinen said FutureMark's reputation has not been tarnished by the spat. "I don't feel like that at all," he said, noting that the feedback from both OEMs and hardware review sites has been positive, and that users have contributed a record number of benchmark submissions to the FutureMark database.

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Source: ExtremeTech