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Shader replacement was extremely popular for years - see AMD's infamous Doom3 shader replacement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1488/6 https://www.anandtech.co

by bri3d 8y ago

Shader replacement was extremely popular for years - see AMD's infamous Doom3 shader replacement: https://www.anandtech.com/show/1488/6 https://www.anandtech.com/show/1488/6 . NVidia drivers did the same thing although they were (generally) a bit smarter about it, relying on shader fingerprinting rather than application fingerprinting to prevent embarrassing "rename the EXE" expose articles. They were notoriously caught using a benchmark's camera path as a fingerprint: https://www.extremetech.com/computing/54154-driver-irregularities-may-inflate-nvidia-benchmarks https://www.extremetech.com/computing/54154-driver-irregular... . GPU drivers are still loaded with such replacements, either to work around bugs or to optimize games where a developer partnership was impossible or otherwise rejected. I think that with the shift to lower-level GPU APIs this practice is beginning to fade, but it's basically been par for the course since programmable shaders became a thing.

hjfa0j 8y ago
There's absolutely nothing wrong with shader replacement. Quite the opposite, as it shows the OEM cares about performance. They have two options: convince the game developer to use a better optimised shader or just replace it themselves. The latter is obviously better.
- bri3d 8y ago
  The latter is obviously better? Shader replacement is fairly fragile and circumvents whatever QA process the game developers had in place - if the shader could be incorporated into the actual product I would think it would be better than shipping thousands of patches. However, I agree that shader replacement is great for the consumer especially in situations where developers have agreed to vendor lock-in/specialization agreements. It's only questionable to me in the sense of benchmarking applications.
lisk1 8y ago
Doom 3 was selling title for Nvidia back in the days. Carmack and Co. didnt wanted to do any optimizations for ATI cards because it wont favor Nvidia cards and they had a contract with them back then.

by bri3d 8y ago

hjfa0j 8y ago

There's absolutely nothing wrong with shader replacement. Quite the opposite, as it shows the OEM cares about performance. They have two options: convince the game developer to use a better optimised shader or just replace it themselves. The latter is obviously better.

bri3d 8y ago
The latter is obviously better? Shader replacement is fairly fragile and circumvents whatever QA process the game developers had in place - if the shader could be incorporated into the actual product I would think it would be better than shipping thousands of patches. However, I agree that shader replacement is great for the consumer especially in situations where developers have agreed to vendor lock-in/specialization agreements. It's only questionable to me in the sense of benchmarking applications.

lisk1 8y ago

Doom 3 was selling title for Nvidia back in the days. Carmack and Co. didnt wanted to do any optimizations for ATI cards because it wont favor Nvidia cards and they had a contract with them back then.