[DominikD]

Maybe. But it's more likely they're replacing shaders with game- or engine-specific workarounds for hardware bugs. Used to do exactly that in my first GPU driver job. The goal wasn't to cheat, but to fix issues in popular games that for one reason or another wouldn't be patched for your GPU on its release.

[captainmuon]

I wonder why they don't just call the game developers on the phone and say "here is AMD, you must fix your shaders, here is the code". Certainly I would jump if I got contacted by AMD or NVIDIA.

Now someone is going to say, if a game breaks people are going to blame AMD, so it is their problem. But AMD would just have to play hardball once, pick a smallish publisher and say "XY refuses to fix their broken code, we even did the work for them, we don't reccommend buying their games".

[hatsunearu]

From what I hear a lot of game engines have horrendous bugs that is terrible for performance (like people straight up using DirectX incorrectly, not being aware of the quadrillion performance hacks that AMD/Nvidia are keenly aware of)--so what AMD and Nvidia does is they "fix" the game engine by making it more performant.

Potentially it might be better for them to contact the game dev for a collaboration or just to tell them to fix their shit, but it might a) be more annoying than to just silently patch their code b) might benefit their competitor.

[dleslie]

Ha, having been on the game dev side of this, it's _also_ often c) the teams of lawyers between the developers and the outside world won't allow collaboration.

The situation is _much_ better nowadays, but in the oughts and early tens it was basically a given that the game source code was considered too valuable to risk sharing.

[danielheath]

People buy AMD to play games; they don’t buy games in order to use their AMD card.

AMD have one job in this situation and they are doing it.

[uxp100]

Right, the above suggestion might work with coordination, where AMD and NVIDIA both bullied a publisher. But if people want to play a game and NVIDIA makes it work great, despite software bugs, and AMD writes a blog post, I think it's pretty reasonable to say "maybe next time I'll buy NVIDIA."

Also I don't think developers would be quite so receptive. It works on every card that exists in the market today, that's kinda your problem if your unreleased chip breaks this is a fairly good argument.

[rualca]

> I wonder why they don't just call the game developers on the phone and say "here is AMD, you must fix your shaders, here is the code".

From my experience as a member of an away team, your own goals is not the home team's goals. Thus the home team has close to zero motivation to rethink their schedule and program just because someone else, who just happened to release their product, happened to find an issue that is only observed and reproduced in a very specific platform that no one uses (yet).

Who has all the motivation to see that bug fixed? The ones releasing the product. Thus, the fixes go in the driver, because that's the only thing in their control.

[TazeTSchnitzel]

There are many situations where this doesn't work:

• Old games. People still want to play these, even though the developers don't maintain them, or no longer exist.

• Game engines. If there's a bug in e.g. Unity or Unreal, that means an unimaginable number of broken games. Likewise for middleware. And it's not the engines or middleware devs who pay the main cost here: all the games using them must be updated. Which may be quite difficult if e.g. the fix is only in the new engine version, but a game project is using an old engine version, and there was some backwards-compatibility break in-between.

• Competition! If one GPU vendor doesn't fix things, its competitors will, and it will lose customers because consumers (rightly) expect that any GPU runs any releases game.

• Gamedevs may not be able to quickly or easily fix a bug. Also bear in mind that in traditional game development, once the game ships, the team is wound down. There's nobody — and no budget — to maintain it.

• New hardware. Gamedevs can't test against your next-gen GPU that hasn't been released yet. If a bug only causes problems on that hardware, how do you get them to fix it and prevent it reoccurring?

[toast0]

When I've worked in big companies, it was hard enough to get working contact information and then convince them to fix bugs in a reasonable time frame for real issues that were important.

In the couple of times I've tried to that accross companies, it's even worse, unless the other company is very accomidating, my company has a direct relationship, and either my company is a major customer or a major expense and the fix will save them a lot of money (and me a lot of headache). If we don't have a direct relationship, it takes months to get in touch with the right person, and then quarters to get a fix into their release schedule, so if I have a fix that works for me and my customers, I'll still put a little effort into reaching out to get it fixed properly, but then I'll just do what works.

[DominikD]

You don't have direct line to every successful developer on the planet when you work on a GPU. And even if you did, why would game developers drop everything for bugs in YOUR hardware?

[Arech]

Anyway, they made insanely stupid implementation now. With unforgivable security flaws. :(

[j4yav]

Having been in the space, is there a reason you’d normally hide that in something made to look like a PCI driver?

[dathinab]

because the program might have been a pci driver which also does executable detection in the past, or ecause it still does some pci driver related stuff, or because on windows there are some people which delete everything where deleting it doesn't seem to directly show some visible functional degradation... ( I'm not kidding, even if it sounds like that).