Quote: "If he had said it wasn't, it would have hurt the company badly"
i never said they should deny it... just not admit it.
Christ you learn that in the first hour at Spin School, don't admit anything unless it gives you the advantage.
It gives Valve no advantages, infact it shows them to be highly unprofessional with a firewall setup so insecure on such a high profile company IP ... although the same thing happened to Microsoft's WindowsXP, the actual hacker couldn't get in from an outside source - it was an internet network Burn Hack, which effectively is where you gain access to a site, find a blank room, hookup your laptop and try to get what you need by trying to prentending to be an employee using his terminal.
as for nVidia being involved, grow up guys - no less that 2weeks ago someone majorly hacked nVidia, they downloaded ALL of the current beta software and is freely distributing it including the source to the 51.63 and 51.75 drivers (the candidates waiting for WHQL release) ... right now nVidia have alot more important things to worry about than some silly computer game.
if anyone would need to have the finger pointed at, the only person who hasn't been touched in these recent spates of hacking is ATi.
Valve, nVidia, AMD, Intel, Microsoft, Gearbox ... each of these guys who have been working closely together have had thier systems hacked and the hackers have gone for very specific targets.
AMD's has to be the most worrying as they made off with the Athlon64/64FX Asm drivers for Windows XP & XP Media Center.
Current consensis going around nVidia & Microsoft is they're going to end the public Beta testing, as this is how people are gaining access. It'll cost them alot to setup internal beta sites as well as employee's but it is becomming more and more apparent that they need stricker control over such things to prevent all of these leaks.
Oh and you want to know the true difference between DetonatorFX 45.23 and 51.73 then i'll upload a little later my quality tests and 3DMark Scores from Mark03 330 ... they're under 1,000 for my FX5200 but that is on an Duron800mhz (currently all i have here)
but its not the final score thats the point its the difference in the scores and FPS - I have to say though, when i updated from 320 to 330 the Mother Nature demo went all weird.
God knows what they changed, but now there is a flickering triangle that takes up most of the bottom-right corner randomly and it not just goes ALOT slower but also doesn't render all of the frames properly as well as hangs.
Visually I can't see a bloody difference and I exported frames and tried to view them very carefully and they look identical to me.
The other demo's also dropped quite dramatically in speed between the patch with no visual difference - again i very closely examined them.
As i said i'll upload later the results i have, will even put together a little movie of the difference between MotherNature between the patchs ... pissed me off a little more tha a little.