9 ms·

yes, that is a very usual way (known practices) of vendors applying specific optimizations for known things. It is also part of the benchmarks game they play a

yes, that is a very usual way (known practices) of vendors applying specific optimizations for known things. It is also part of the benchmarks game they play against each other.

MichaelZuo 1y ago
It’s really strange for established companies to waste their credibility on games like that…
- MangoToupe 1y ago
  I was pretty young at the time, but I recall the market for graphics being a lot wider open at the time Quake was released. Remember 3dfx? They produced the Voodoo series of graphics cards. They're barely a distant memory now. Quake was also the standard for a game that was willing to fully exploit the hardware of the time.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  Never underestimate how much human ego will control actions.
MBCook 1y ago
The link is long dead and the Wayback machine doesn’t have a copy. But in 2001 ATI was caught applying optimizations to Quake 3 when someone realized if you renamed the executable from “quake” to “quack” the score dropped a ton. It was a big scandal. I know that’s common now but that wasn’t a thing that was done at the time.
- hinkley 1y ago
  There are bugs that certain games rely on and features that some don’t use. I’m currently trying to optimize a library out of spite. (I want it to work better than the competitor that caused me a lot of problems on a recent project). The amount of conditional logic around what is essentially a function to increment a value is breathtaking.
  - gatlin 1y ago
    Do you have any kind of example you're able to share? I don't mean to take your IP but I want to see this breathtaking vista.
    - hinkley 1y ago
      To avoid doxxing myself: In a deep call stack it’s possible to end up sanitizing inputs multiple times and in different ways. A frequent example I’ve encountered is web frameworks that have to keep checking for escaped text because they didn’t write it in horizontal layers where you know for sure that all inputs have been scrubbed when they reach this function but not that one. So the same functions get called with data that comes from your team and from customers. Reuse is tricky.
      - hamburglar 1y ago
        “Checking for escaped text” is the sort of nonsense that tells you you’re dealing with amateur developers.
        withinboredom 1y ago
        Indeed. The rules are simple: - Unescape, sanitize or validate at all entry points. - Escape all outputs (this includes the database queries). If you follow those simple rules, you never have to check once you are past a controller. And you should fuzz your controllers to make sure no unexpected data makes it past there.
        hinkley 1y ago
        Thing about taking a job is they don’t generally let you look at the code first and nope out if it’s fucked six ways to Sunday. Everyone has clever answers for greenfield projects and empty rhetoric for brown.
    - amiga386 1y ago
      A simple example would be that the function glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS) crashes the original Quake engine and many licensees, because it's expecting no more than a 256 character string. The driver looks to see if a known old game is calling it, and if it's one known to crash, it returns no more than 256 characters, and likely also puts all the _old_ extensions that the game is likely to know and react to in the string. There are also all sorts of games that called APIs in a particular order or set particular options, because they represented a "fast path" at the time, and now they don't, but if you're that program, then yes they do. Ultimately, this clutter is what let do the development of the Vulcan API, to stop games second-guessing graphics APIs which themselves second-guess the games.
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  In at least one past version of Windows (circa 1990s), if you tried to replace the default web browser of IE with another choice you were given an Open File dialog window to choose the executable. Funny quirk, though: that particular window wouldn't show files named firefox.exe. It would accept that as typed input, if you were at the correct folder, but the file listing omitted that particular file. Maybe it was mozilla.exe; it was a long time ago. But that was the discovery that pushed me off IE forever.
  - lstamour 1y ago
    I vaguely remember that being the start of the browser prompts to set your current browser as the default. It was so hard to just configure that they had to build a way to set it within the browser. You saw that again in more modern times when Microsoft removed support for the APIs they provided to set browser defaults, forcing browser makers to write step by step instructions on what to click to set the default browser. I believe they walked that back, but it left such a bad taste that I switched my installation of Windows from default mode to EU mode in order to avoid it. And come to think of it, I haven’t used my windows machine for much outside of AI in about 6 months. But Microsoft is not alone in these sort of defaults games - every OS or browser maker, Apple, Google, Firefox, wants to create moats so they can more easily monetize your usage of a product. I never thought I’d prefer the business model of free to play games, where they just outright ask you for money and have to keep finding new ways to entertain instead of relying on hard to change defaults and selling your data.
    - charcircuit 1y ago
      An app being able to see itself as the default browser sounds like such a dangerous API, especially if it can be done silently without the user realizing it.
- atomicnumber3 1y ago
  Was it a scandal at the time? My understanding of how per-game card-driver optimizations work today is: 1. AAAA Game Studio shits out another unoptimized clunker 2. nvidia considers it a reputational risk if games run at 30 FPS on a 5090 3. They go in, look at the perverse ways the game misuses rendering primitives, and then hacks shit in to make whatever bad things they're doing less bad. As a gamer, this seems fine to me and i generally blame the AAAA devs for being bad at their jobs or AAAA studio leads for being ok shipping unoptimized messes.
  - gmueckl 1y ago
    Except that if a developer has that kind of market pull, nVidida will gladly help those devs with getting it right. They are excellent at maintaining developer relations.
  - btbuilder 1y ago
    I believe the driver silently swapped the textures to lower quality ones that looked worse but gave a performance boost.
  - antonvs 1y ago
    > As a gamer, this seems fine to me As a software developer, it almost certainly has a bad effect on the ecosystem long term. "Hacks shit in" is the very definition of technical debt, and that has a cost that someone, somewhere is going to have to pay in some form.
    - monkpit 1y ago
      You’re looking as a dev, but the reality is that a consumer cannot see technical debt. If the studio churns out a game, the vendor sprinkles on some optimizations, people play it and move on, then the tech debt just vaporizes into the void. It’s not real at that point.
      - wtetzner 1y ago
        Just because a consumer can't see technical debt doesn't mean they aren't paying for it. Most game studios continue to re-use code, so it doesn't just "vaporize" into the void.
- bosco_mcnasty 1y ago
  the etiology of this hack is pretty obvious with a simple google search: https://docs.nvidia.com/cutlass/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/cutlass/index.html it presumably makes various assumptions and speedups for NVIDIA's matrix multiplication library... called cutlass

yes, that is a very usual way (known practices) of vendors applying specific optimizations for known things. It is also part of the benchmarks game they play against each other.

MichaelZuo 1y ago

It’s really strange for established companies to waste their credibility on games like that…

MangoToupe 1y ago
I was pretty young at the time, but I recall the market for graphics being a lot wider open at the time Quake was released. Remember 3dfx? They produced the Voodoo series of graphics cards. They're barely a distant memory now. Quake was also the standard for a game that was willing to fully exploit the hardware of the time.
IAmBroom 1y ago
Never underestimate how much human ego will control actions.

MBCook 1y ago

The link is long dead and the Wayback machine doesn’t have a copy. But in 2001 ATI was caught applying optimizations to Quake 3 when someone realized if you renamed the executable from “quake” to “quack” the score dropped a ton. It was a big scandal. I know that’s common now but that wasn’t a thing that was done at the time.

hinkley 1y ago
There are bugs that certain games rely on and features that some don’t use. I’m currently trying to optimize a library out of spite. (I want it to work better than the competitor that caused me a lot of problems on a recent project). The amount of conditional logic around what is essentially a function to increment a value is breathtaking.
- gatlin 1y ago
  Do you have any kind of example you're able to share? I don't mean to take your IP but I want to see this breathtaking vista.
  - hinkley 1y ago
    To avoid doxxing myself: In a deep call stack it’s possible to end up sanitizing inputs multiple times and in different ways. A frequent example I’ve encountered is web frameworks that have to keep checking for escaped text because they didn’t write it in horizontal layers where you know for sure that all inputs have been scrubbed when they reach this function but not that one. So the same functions get called with data that comes from your team and from customers. Reuse is tricky.
    - hamburglar 1y ago
      “Checking for escaped text” is the sort of nonsense that tells you you’re dealing with amateur developers.
      - withinboredom 1y ago
        Indeed. The rules are simple: - Unescape, sanitize or validate at all entry points. - Escape all outputs (this includes the database queries). If you follow those simple rules, you never have to check once you are past a controller. And you should fuzz your controllers to make sure no unexpected data makes it past there.
        hinkley 1y ago
        Thing about taking a job is they don’t generally let you look at the code first and nope out if it’s fucked six ways to Sunday. Everyone has clever answers for greenfield projects and empty rhetoric for brown.
  - amiga386 1y ago
    A simple example would be that the function glGetString(GL_EXTENSIONS) crashes the original Quake engine and many licensees, because it's expecting no more than a 256 character string. The driver looks to see if a known old game is calling it, and if it's one known to crash, it returns no more than 256 characters, and likely also puts all the _old_ extensions that the game is likely to know and react to in the string. There are also all sorts of games that called APIs in a particular order or set particular options, because they represented a "fast path" at the time, and now they don't, but if you're that program, then yes they do. Ultimately, this clutter is what let do the development of the Vulcan API, to stop games second-guessing graphics APIs which themselves second-guess the games.
IAmBroom 1y ago
In at least one past version of Windows (circa 1990s), if you tried to replace the default web browser of IE with another choice you were given an Open File dialog window to choose the executable. Funny quirk, though: that particular window wouldn't show files named firefox.exe. It would accept that as typed input, if you were at the correct folder, but the file listing omitted that particular file. Maybe it was mozilla.exe; it was a long time ago. But that was the discovery that pushed me off IE forever.
- lstamour 1y ago
  I vaguely remember that being the start of the browser prompts to set your current browser as the default. It was so hard to just configure that they had to build a way to set it within the browser. You saw that again in more modern times when Microsoft removed support for the APIs they provided to set browser defaults, forcing browser makers to write step by step instructions on what to click to set the default browser. I believe they walked that back, but it left such a bad taste that I switched my installation of Windows from default mode to EU mode in order to avoid it. And come to think of it, I haven’t used my windows machine for much outside of AI in about 6 months. But Microsoft is not alone in these sort of defaults games - every OS or browser maker, Apple, Google, Firefox, wants to create moats so they can more easily monetize your usage of a product. I never thought I’d prefer the business model of free to play games, where they just outright ask you for money and have to keep finding new ways to entertain instead of relying on hard to change defaults and selling your data.
  - charcircuit 1y ago
    An app being able to see itself as the default browser sounds like such a dangerous API, especially if it can be done silently without the user realizing it.
atomicnumber3 1y ago
Was it a scandal at the time? My understanding of how per-game card-driver optimizations work today is: 1. AAAA Game Studio shits out another unoptimized clunker 2. nvidia considers it a reputational risk if games run at 30 FPS on a 5090 3. They go in, look at the perverse ways the game misuses rendering primitives, and then hacks shit in to make whatever bad things they're doing less bad. As a gamer, this seems fine to me and i generally blame the AAAA devs for being bad at their jobs or AAAA studio leads for being ok shipping unoptimized messes.
- gmueckl 1y ago
  Except that if a developer has that kind of market pull, nVidida will gladly help those devs with getting it right. They are excellent at maintaining developer relations.
- btbuilder 1y ago
  I believe the driver silently swapped the textures to lower quality ones that looked worse but gave a performance boost.
- antonvs 1y ago
  > As a gamer, this seems fine to me As a software developer, it almost certainly has a bad effect on the ecosystem long term. "Hacks shit in" is the very definition of technical debt, and that has a cost that someone, somewhere is going to have to pay in some form.
  - monkpit 1y ago
    You’re looking as a dev, but the reality is that a consumer cannot see technical debt. If the studio churns out a game, the vendor sprinkles on some optimizations, people play it and move on, then the tech debt just vaporizes into the void. It’s not real at that point.
    - wtetzner 1y ago
      Just because a consumer can't see technical debt doesn't mean they aren't paying for it. Most game studios continue to re-use code, so it doesn't just "vaporize" into the void.
bosco_mcnasty 1y ago
the etiology of this hack is pretty obvious with a simple google search: https://docs.nvidia.com/cutlass/index.html https://docs.nvidia.com/cutlass/index.html it presumably makes various assumptions and speedups for NVIDIA's matrix multiplication library... called cutlass