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

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.