[hodgehog11]

I think we're starting to see more of this sort of thing happening now with Proton and Wine gaining prominence in the Linux community. Some games (Elden Ring comes to mind) have bad enough PC ports when they come out that the compatibility layer can incorporate a hotfix to improve performance, while users of the software on the original platform still had to suffer.

[Gigachad]

Fairly sure GPU drivers do the same thing where they include a ton of per game tweaks to make them run faster. It does feel like a fragile way of doing things where an external component that should be agnostic to the software running ends up including a handful of junk trying to fix stuff that should have been fixed by the consumer of the driver.

[Guvante]

It goes the other way too, sometimes you trigger some optimization silliness in the driver and the game needs to adapt to avoid it.

[anilakar]

GPU driver packages are already a huge collection of workarounds for bad game engine coding.

An Nvidia employee once told me that one of the easiest ways to squeeze out a few extra frames on your old machine is to rename the game executable to hl2.exe.

[necovek]

I can see how it can modify GPU driver behavior, but I cannot see how it would get you better performance with everything else the same?

What it should do is ensure some things not relevant to Half-Life 2 were not done, thus getting better performance for this game in particular, but there is no guarantee that same optimizations work for other applications or games, so one should not expect an overall improvement.

Unless they are doing some silly things like dropping quality, but that's the "everything else the same" point.

If not, why not have this enabled as default behavior instead?

[st_goliath]

> GPU driver packages are already a huge collection of workarounds for bad game engine coding.

And of course, browser engines also do the same things for certain websites:

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

https://github.com/WebKit/WebKit/blob/main/Source/WebCore/pa...

[limflick]

> to rename the game executable to hl2.exe

This seems genuinely unbelievable. Does anyone have a technical explanation for this?

[hurtigioll]

gpu drivers detect games, among other thing by looking at executable names

then driver "optimizes" behavior, sometimes dishonestly (reducing precision), sometimes honestly (working around game engine stupidity)

[limflick]

Couldn't that also cause glitches since optimizations meant for HL2 might not work for, say San Andreas? I understand some optimizations might be universal but I can't help but think about unexpected behavior.

[tester756]

Who's problem is this?

Nvidia probably doesnt officially say anything about this and 99.9% of people do not rename process name

[proton_9]

This sounds like a really interesting story, would like to read more on why half life 2 specifically? the game itself was pretty well optimized and ran on really low end hardware even back in the day.

[db48x]

Because everyone reported performance metrics using it as a benchmark. Higher number = more sales.

[murderfs]

If you go back 5 years, everyone was using Quake 3 Arena as the benchmark. ATI got in some hot water because if you renamed quake3.exe to quack3.exe, your FPS would drop by 15%, because they were silently reducing quality to juice their benchmark numbers.

[tester756]

5 or 50? I'd say 5 years ago it was already Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 5, etc.

[harrall]

A big portion of GPU driver updates are actually just that, same with Windows updates.

Windows 95 patched a bug in SimCity just to get it to work.