4 ms·
Reminds me of how some old ATI graphics drivers detect whether you were running Quake 3, and turn down the graphics quality for the sake of better benchmarks.
by Kronopath 13y ago
Reminds me of how some old ATI graphics drivers detect whether you were running Quake 3, and turn down the graphics quality for the sake of better benchmarks.
Renaming quake3.exe to quack3.exe would fool the detectors and skip these "optimizations".[1]
[1] http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_cheating_radeon_8500_drivers/ http://www.hardocp.com/article/2001/10/23/optimizing_or_chea...
- dman 13y agoNvidia has been caught doing exactly this multiple times. Same with intel compilers. Same with car makers who optimize for EPA testing conditions. Given a benchmark people will "optimize".
- mikro2nd 13y agoOr... "Tell me how you measure me, and I'll tell you how I behave"
- diminish 13y agoMoreover. Weren't Oracle, Sybase, Ms SQL Server doing same type of optimizations just for benchmarking purposes since their beginnings?
- Pxtl 13y agoTo be fair, Quake 3 fans are known for prioritizing frames-per-second beyond all other considerations. One could argue that tweaking the graphical quality for Q3 to encourage high framerates is just giving customers what they want.
- moogleii 13y agoOne could, but that'd be a stretch. It should be a discrete option left up to the user. If they're tweaking that much, they'll know or seek the knowledge on how to activate it themselves.
- roc 13y agoExcept this was done against the explicit graphics settings the customers had set and only for a handful of games that were regularly used as benchmarks. Customers who actually want framerate-beyond-all-else don't enable/would disable those settings in the first place. So if it were "giving the customer what they want" they'd have respected the customer's settings. What it actually was, was a simple recognition that people used "framerate at max quality" as a proxy for net card performance and an attempt to "game" such measures by not actually running at max quality, for those games that were common benchmarks.
- macspoofing 13y ago>To be fair ... Do whatever the fuck you want, but be upfront and transparent about it. If you aren't, you're shady and sleazy.
- jmcintyre 13y agoInteresting that this article seems to be getting flagged pretty heavily and quickly moved from #1 to #23. http://hnrankings.info/6476120/ http://hnrankings.info/6476120/ Reminds me of this http://www.indiatimes.com/technology/enterprise/samsung-âhired-students-to-attack-htc-online-72423.html http://www.indiatimes.com/technology/enterprise/samsung-âh... If Apple or Microsoft pulled this stunt, the article would be in the HN top 10 for days.