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Heh. Does anyone remember when almost 25 years ago ATI (AMD) caught manipulating the Quake III benchmarks by renaming the executables to ‘quack’? https://web.a

• a-french-anon 1y ago
  Or Intel checking for "GenuineIntel" in ICC's output: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler#Support_for_non-Intel_processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_C%2B%2B_Compiler#Support...
  • cratermoon 1y ago
    Or Win 3.1 looking for whatever shibboleth was in MS-DOS and popping up a scary-looking message if it found another DOS? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AARD_code
    • keanb 1y ago
      I don’t think anybody remembers this since that code never shipped in retail.
      • GeekyBear 1y ago
        It didn't ship (in the final retail version) only after the tech press of the day exposed what Microsoft had done.
        • cratermoon 1y ago
          It did ship in the final retail version, in way. It was disabled, but the code was still there, and a flag was all that was needed to enable it.
• mattlondon 1y ago
  Just in case anyone else parsed that sentence the same way as me, ati detected "quake" as the executable and changed things like texture quality etc to increase benchmark performance. Some people discovered this after they renamed the executable to "quack" and the image quality improved but the benchmarks were lower, proving that the ati drivers "optimised" by reducing quality. Ati did not rename quake to quack as I originally thought from this! :)
  • a_wild_dandan 1y ago
    Thank you for explaining. I was so confused at how AMD was improving Quake performance with duck-like monikers.
    • stavros 1y ago
      Well, if it _looks_ like a high-performance texture renderer, and it _walks_ like a high-performance texture renderer...
      • _joel 1y ago
        It's probably been duck typed
        • tbalsam 1y ago
          shocked quack
      • taneq 1y ago
        If it looks like a benchmark and it quacks like a benchmark… duck?
  • Dwedit 1y ago
    The story was that they used a lower mipmap level (blurrier textures) when the process was named Quake, but used the normal mipmap level (standard textures) when the process was named Quack.
  • 1y ago
• mort96 1y ago
  Are there any archives of that techreport article with images intact?
  • haunter 1y ago
    Ah yes they changed the site and URL system after some years, here is the OG one with screenshots Page 1 https://web.archive.org/web/20071028172853/http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/1 https://web.archive.org/web/20071028172853/http://techreport... Page 2 https://web.archive.org/web/20111130162817/http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/2 https://web.archive.org/web/20111130162817/http://techreport... Page 3 https://web.archive.org/web/20080213212637/http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/3 https://web.archive.org/web/20080213212637/http://techreport... Page 4 https://web.archive.org/web/20101110031431/http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/4 https://web.archive.org/web/20101110031431/http://techreport... Page 5 https://web.archive.org/web/20101108144857/http://techreport.com/articles.x/3089/5 https://web.archive.org/web/20101108144857/http://techreport...
• bayindirh 1y ago
  For more context and deeper discussion on the subject, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44531107 Funnily, it's under an older submission of the same cutlass optimizations.
• Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  This is weirdly common; phone chipset manufacturers did it with phone benchmarks [0], VW with emissions [1], nVidia did it with 3DMark [2], Intel with the SPEC benchmark for its Xeon processors [3], etc. When it comes to computer graphics, iirc it's pretty normalized now - graphics drivers all seem to have tweaks, settings, optimizations and workarounds for every game. (As an aside, I hate that I have to link to archive.org, there's a lot of dead links nowadays but these are important things to remember). [0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250306120819/https://www.anandtech.com/show/15703/mobile-benchmark-cheating-mediatek https://web.archive.org/web/20250306120819/https://www.anand... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20051218120547/http://techreport.com/etc/2003q2/3dmurk03/index.x?pg=1 https://web.archive.org/web/20051218120547/http://techreport... [3] https://www.servethehome.com/impact-of-intel-compiler-optimizations-on-spec-cpu2017-example-hpe-dell/ https://www.servethehome.com/impact-of-intel-compiler-optimi...
  • cesarb 1y ago
    > When it comes to computer graphics, iirc it's pretty normalized now - graphics drivers all seem to have tweaks, settings, optimizations and workarounds for every game. Even Mesa has them: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/util/00-mesa-defaults.conf https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mesa/mesa/-/blob/main/src/uti...
  • wat10000 1y ago
    Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
  • darkmighty 1y ago
    > graphics drivers all seem to have tweaks, settings, optimizations and workarounds for every game. Maybe hyperbole, but I think obviously they can't do this for literally every game, that would require huge personnel resources. At least looking at mesa (linked elsewhere), only ~200 games are patched, out of what 100k PC games? So <1%.
    • 1y ago
• torginus 1y ago
  Every vendor does this to this day - and its a morally grey practice, drivers hijack and modify the rendering loops of popular games, fixing bugs, replacing shaders with more optimized versions, enabling faster codepaths in the driver etc. These changes are supposed to have minimal to no impact on the actual output, but sometimes vendors are really aggressive, and significantly degrade the outputs so that the game can run faster on their hardware.
  • Aurornis 1y ago
    > but sometimes vendors are really aggressive, and significantly degrade the outputs so that the game can run faster on their hardware. Do you have a source for this? I’d like to see some examples
    • AnotherGoodName 1y ago
      Nvidia has a control panel with it's drivers. Open it up -> Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings. Scroll through and see how every single program/game you have installed openly has different defaults in it based on application name. As someone noted above others do the same thing. Eg. Frostpunk has Antialiasing for transparency layers on. Slay the spire does not. I never set these settings. Nvidia literally does a lookup on first run for what they judge as best defaults and sets these appropriately. Every single game/program you install has different options from a huge list of possible optimizations.
      • School-Cotton 1y ago
        Applying different standard settings is pretty different from "hijacking and modifying the rendering loop", though.
        • altairprime 1y ago
          In what sense? The render loop is modified from “the” default without user or program opt-in, and “hijacking” is what it would be called if anyone but Nvidia did it — so Nvidia is not exempt from that use. Though: Runtime patch, haxie, hijack, LD_PRELOAD, system extension; the noun changes every few years, so perhaps it’s time for a new one. Override?
• Adachi91 1y ago
  I feel like omitting AMD is relevant here for anyone who doesn't know the acquisition history of ATI, AMD had no involvement with this.