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0 pointszten2y ago0 comments

See the infamous story about Quack 3 on ATI Radeon cards.

0 comments

Here's the link, for those interested:

https://techreport.com/review/how-atis-drivers-optimize-quak...

Personally, I don't believe this is a good example; as this was ATI purposefully crippling the experience (downscaling textures, being the prime aspect) to cheat benchmarks. OP is more referring to "transparent" optimizations (the same experience, but made to run faster for the GPUs architecture, usually via operation reordering or shader modifications).

ztenOP2y ago

Ah, yes, that's true, it's usually not done maliciously like the ATI example. It came to mind because it was a well-documented case of the driver being aware of the application and changing behavior.

account422y ago

Newer APIs even have the program provide more detailed information [0] so workarounds can more easily apply to e.g. multiple games using the same engine. Renaming the executable won't be enough to test for / disable this kind of hack today.

[0] https://registry.khronos.org/vulkan/specs/1.3-extensions/man...

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