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The tech industry has been guilty of this in the past as well. Example: Nvidia and AMD drivers detected if you were running certain benchmarks or games, and wou

The tech industry has been guilty of this in the past as well. Example: Nvidia and AMD drivers detected if you were running certain benchmarks or games, and would cheat by downgrading various rendering settings that had minimal effect visually. Often this was a simple check to get the process's executable name; simply renaming the .exe would get you significantly different perf results.

MBCook 11y ago
Yeah that was how I first learned about this with ATI cheating on Quake III in 2001, as discovered by HardOCP. Here's a link to an article about it (original article doesn't seem to be around anymore): http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-quake-iii http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-q...
- kbrosnan 11y ago
  Wayback has it http://web.archive.org/web/20020223144052/http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vidcards/ati/8500/quack/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020223144052/http://www.hardocp... along with a link to a German site that points out some of the quality loss in the ATI driver. http://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php http://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php
bri3d 11y ago
PhysX's "CPU-only" codepath was intentionally built at a lower optimization level than their "with NVidia GPU" codepath for a while, leading to disproportionately lower performance than simply the lack of GPU kernels would create: http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbles-physx-cpu/ http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbl...
justincormack 11y ago
In this case defeat devices are specifically outlawed though, and VW have admitted creating them, so they are actually going to get punished, may put some people off.
balls187 11y ago
MSFT was accused of gaming javascript benchmarks with IE9.
e28eta 11y ago
Mobile device manufacturers were doing it 2 years ago: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android-benchmarks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-andr...

MBCook 11y ago

Yeah that was how I first learned about this with ATI cheating on Quake III in 2001, as discovered by HardOCP. Here's a link to an article about it (original article doesn't seem to be around anymore): http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-quake-iii http://techreport.com/review/3089/how-ati-drivers-optimize-q...

kbrosnan 11y ago
Wayback has it http://web.archive.org/web/20020223144052/http://www.hardocp.com/reviews/vidcards/ati/8500/quack/ http://web.archive.org/web/20020223144052/http://www.hardocp... along with a link to a German site that points out some of the quality loss in the ATI driver. http://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php http://alt.3dcenter.org/artikel/2001/10-24_a.php

bri3d 11y ago

PhysX's "CPU-only" codepath was intentionally built at a lower optimization level than their "with NVidia GPU" codepath for a while, leading to disproportionately lower performance than simply the lack of GPU kernels would create: http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbles-physx-cpu/ http://semiaccurate.com/2010/07/07/nvidia-purposefully-hobbl...

justincormack 11y ago

In this case defeat devices are specifically outlawed though, and VW have admitted creating them, so they are actually going to get punished, may put some people off.

balls187 11y ago

MSFT was accused of gaming javascript benchmarks with IE9.

e28eta 11y ago

Mobile device manufacturers were doing it 2 years ago: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-android-benchmarks http://www.anandtech.com/show/7384/state-of-cheating-in-andr...