Lod doesn't really alter the code as it's defined by driver settings. It's kinda like the AA and AF settings: it changes the way the videocard has to render the given course, it doesn't change it.
Theoretically, changing the resolution should be considered as a tweak IF it's all about the highest 3DMark01 score. But we can't compare those results to the ones we currently have. In order to be able to compare, you always need a set of ground rules, which are easy to verify. FM doesn't offer the details of the lod used in a bench, so no one would really know if the score was lod tweaked or not.
If FM decides to prevent lod tweaks by inserting a lod prevention tool in their next 3D bench, I would be 100% ready to bench without the lod tweaks ... but untill then, they just help us to push the hardware a little further.
(I guess, 3dmark03?) You can still see it's a butterfly, you can still see the water coming down from the hill, you can still see the turtle, you can still see the rock where the butterfly is landing on ... you still know what it's about. It's not like you're running the wireframe and can't see what the creators intended to show.
Last sentence is absolutley correct, but why shouldn't we use the tools nVidia itself gave us?
That's indeed the point when talking about real ingame performance and benchmark performance. When you want to compare two videocards and want to see the performance ingame, you use a real game and all standard settings. If you want to test and compare just how fast the videocard can be compared to another one, you can use synthetic benchmarks and try to let it as fast as possible. Lods are given to us as they're inside the nVidia drivers, so we can use them.
Lod48 in NVHardpage = lod3 in riva, if I'm not mistaken. You can set lods to 15 in rivatuner with a small tweak in the power users' tab.
It's true, though, that AM3 doesn't like lods at all. I remember lod 1.9(!) gave me the best result when I was benching the Ti200 a long time ago. Prolly faster because it took away a little of the cpu load, not because the gpu hade to render fewer details
Higher clocks is definitly true, especially for the 3dmark01. If you tweak each test (7 in total), you normally have 7 different lod settings and 7 different frequencies. In nature, for example, I'm mostly able to set the clocks 20mhz higher than I would when benching lod0.