A simple trick makes it possible to cheat with pretty much any synthetic hardware benchmarking software. Brazilian professional overclocker, Ronaldo Buassali, has posted a video demonstrating the method with the 3DMark Suite. The trick makes it possible to cheat in overclock competitions of which some award money to the best overclocker.
(Video demonstrating the method - the spoken language is Portuguese, so be sure to enable subtitles)
The trick Buassali demonstrates is fairly simple. The idea is to apply different driver settings in the timeframe between the user clicking start and the actual start of the benchmarking process. Usually it takes some time for benchmarking software to prepare its benchmarking actions.
If driver settings, such as image quality are changed during the benchmarking, results are invalidated. However, when driver settings are changed between the user initiated start and the actual start of the benchmark the results will still be valid.
In the video Buassali demonstrates how he first scores 12,638 and 13,278 in Time Spy and how he scores 12,951 and 13,800 after his trick. Benchmarking software from Futuremark, UNIGINE and Allbenchmark are reportedly affected.
Futuremark has stated to be aware of the issue and that it is currently testing a fix that it plans to release in the near future. The company will manually check (existing) submissions to its database and invalidate results it finds suspicious. Entries to its Hall of Fame are not accepted without the upcoming fix installed.
