For years, Futuremark's (the company formerly known as Mad Onion) 3DMark series has been considered the leading synthetic benchmark for graphic card performance. Some of the benchmark's success is due to marketing, with a dash of ease of use, a dollop of consistency, and an ounce of entertainment value added in for spice. Discussions and arguments have swirled around the 3DMark series ever since 3DMark 2003, when ExtremeTech discovered NVIDIA had released drivers that flat-out cheated when rendering the benchmark.
The resulting flurry of PR's between FutureMark and NVIDIA fooled no one, and the 'we're best friends again' scenario that resulted did nothing to restore credibility to either side. To date, FutureMark only allows certain "approved" optimizations in its 'official' driver recommendations, which raises the murky issue between drivers and cheats all over again.