I've read something similar by Michael Abrash. Based on a press-release for the capabilities of a new graphics card that would have blown his project out of th

I've read something similar by Michael Abrash. Based on a press-release for the capabilities of a new graphics card that would have blown his project out of the water, an engineer spent a long time thinking about what they must be doing to get that sort of performance. He figured they were using a FIFO somewhere in the circuitry, and had enough space to implement a 1-deep FIFO for a certain operation, figuring that it wasn't enough. Turns out, his improved chip beat the benchmarks that were in the original press release because they had implemented a FIFO for a different operation that had less impact on performance.