When I made my editorial posting Saturday evening, I hoped that I could finally calm down the rough tides that arose from the Q3test-article, but the Saturday-posting was indeed not really the right way to achieve this whatsoever. I can see that the things I said on Saturday weren't exactly helpful. Due to the fact that I really don't have any desire to waste anymore time on that stupid issue that was generated by me as well, I will try now to rectify things once and for all.

Why Did All This Fuss Happen In The First Place?

Let's first of all please remember what the fuss is really all about. The rough atmosphere has initially been generated by only one thing I said quite a while ago, which is "TNT2 is better than Voodoo3". Since the day when I published this statement, the hardware community on the web was split between the '3Dfx-believers' and the 'NVIDIA-believers'. I was suddenly under fire from all the people who did not want to believe that their 'god' 3Dfx was not supposed to be the master of all things anymore. I was told that I was 'biased' or 'paid off' and I made the one serious mistake to take those accusations to heart.

It's No Fun Being Under Permanent Fire ...

Now I will say it once more, once and for all, I have never been paid off for good reviews by anybody and I won't ever do that in the future as well. I never even had the slightest need to do anything like that. However, mails saying I was biased from several people and especially posts on other websites claiming that I've been paid off really hurt and upset me. This was wrong, I should never have bothered even reading or looking at this, but certainly I shouldn't have felt compelled to prove all of the time that TNT2 is indeed better. I also made comments against those polemic postings, this way pouring oil into the fire rather than calming things down. I simply tried to prove in any comment that I made and from every test that I did, that TNT2 simply deserves my credits over Voodoo3 and that this doesn't have the slightest thing to do with bias or even a pay-off. The result was that the fronts between the 'pro-NVIDIA' and the 'pro-3Dfx' people hardened and I made myself look as if I was the bad guy all over sudden.

The Q3test-Disaster

The climax of all that fuss was finally reached when I published the Q3test-article. It went pretty smoothly, TNT2 scored significantly better than Voodoo3 and the image quality produced by 3Dfx's first 'Q3-compatible' driver was really bad as well, which I didn't hesitate to point out. The one really good result this article had, was that 3Dfx felt really forced to do some serious work on their driver. If everything would have been fine with Q3test, I certainly could claim credits for forcing 3Dfx to shell out a better driver only 2 days after the release of Q3test. Unfortunately things didn't continue smoothly. I hadn't published the way I conducted the timedemo-benchmark with Q3test, to keep my time advantage over those websites who hadn't anything better to do than either copying me or who try to amaze their readership with the oh-so-popular anti-Tom postings. This was a procedure, which is common enough and I never had any doubt that I would finally explain how to do the benchmark some two or three days after the article went up. Now it didn't surprise me, that many websites who would have liked to run this benchmark too and who couldn't figure out how, would start to attack the credibility of my results, just as an excuse for not being able to publish those results by themselves. We want to be honest, this was certainly true for the majority of 'q3test timedemo doesn't work, so Tom is lying' -postings on the first day of my q3test-article. I just didn't bother about it, since I had got used to the fact that some guys doubt everything I say just to grab some credits for themselves. The really bad thing happened when Brian Hook got involved into the whole issue. He asked me how I did my benchmarks and I thought 'well, he is from Id, so he should know by himself really'. I considered his postings, saying that the benchmark cannot possibly be 100% valid, as simply blowing smoke and made the big mistake of not reacting to his postings properly, but making nasty comments about him instead. This was the time when all the 'anti-Tom'-websites saw their big chance and I can't even blame them, since I had given them enough material to back up their campaigns against me.