[hjfa0j]

There's absolutely nothing wrong with shader replacement. Quite the opposite, as it shows the OEM cares about performance. They have two options: convince the game developer to use a better optimised shader or just replace it themselves. The latter is obviously better.

[bri3d]

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.