this pattern of a platform dev special casing in their product for specific games still goes on today, but by Nvidia and AMD. When a new, giant game comes out,

this pattern of a platform dev special casing in their product for specific games still goes on today, but by Nvidia and AMD. When a new, giant game comes out, nine times out of ten the developers did some depraved stuff with directx/opengl that worked on whatever few cards they actually tested on. When the game gets released (or sometimes as a prerelease), Nvidia/AMD will go through what the new game does on their hardware, find any hackey/unexpected/bad call to their drivers made by the game, fix these problems in their drivers for these specific games, and release new drivers a few days after the game releases. You could buy a $60 game on launch that is broken from the AAA developer and have to wait days to weeks on a patch from Nvidia to play with any playable framereate/graphics in general. I believe I read about this phenomenon here https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-dx12vulkanmantle/?do=findComment&comment=5215019 https://www.gamedev.net/forums/topic/666419-what-are-your-op...