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.
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.
It goes the other way too, sometimes you trigger some optimization silliness in the driver and the game needs to adapt to avoid it.
then the driver gets updated and the game either continues to optimize (wrong) or branches out into code that was written before that driver came out and generally wasn't that well tested, and the circle continues...
It's the life of a (game) developer...
The big one I remember was many applications, not just games assuming the buffer swap was performed by a blit into the display buffer, not an framebuffer pointer update. They relied on the previous frames data still being in the back buffer. For those applications you were forced to blit the buffer, not swap the pointer and take a performance hit.
I also remember a media player being called out by name in the code for doing invalid operations, needing a work around and code to detect it was running just to function.
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.
> 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...
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?
In general, because it's a flag that says to do things in an incorrect but faster way. It's like -ffast-math. The applications for which it's intended don't do anything where the incorrectness matters. Some random application falsely labeled hl2.exe may or may not.
> 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.
I can't quite parse this. Yes, there is no guarantee that the optimizations will work for another game, which is precisely why you can expect an improvement with hl2. With non-hl2, you may get an improvement, you may not, and you may get incorrect behavior.
Everything else is not the same, but hl2 doesn't use the stuff that's different.
I wouldn't be surprised if it made other games on the Source engine faster, but everything else slower.
> to rename the game executable to hl2.exe
This seems genuinely unbelievable. Does anyone have a technical explanation for this?
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)
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.
Yes.
A lot of people use Nvidia profile inspector to enable reBar on all games and claim that Nvidia is purposely holding back performance, but doing this causes many games to crash.
Who's problem is this?
Nvidia probably doesnt officially say anything about this and 99.9% of people do not rename process name
It's definitely Nvidia's problem if this breaks something. Nothing in the D3D/OpenGL specs says that you can (not) use certain executable names.
[dead]
Phrasing, I wasn't blaming anyone, just curious about the technicalities.
of course they do.
nvidia even has an official api for a game to identify itself so they dont need to look at executable name
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.
Because everyone reported performance metrics using it as a benchmark. Higher number = more sales.
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.
Apparently people did this with the DirectX "3D Tunnel" demo as well[1] back over 20 years ago.
Also there was one "that checked if you were printing a specific string used by a popular benchmark program. If so, then it only drew the string a quarter of the time and merely returned without doing anything the other three quarters of the time".
[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20040305-00/?p=40...
5 or 50? I'd say 5 years ago it was already Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 5, etc.
5 years before hl2
Yep, someone needs to do the same workarounds Windows drivers do but on Linux and the translation layer is a good spot for them, look at https://github.com/HansKristian-Work/vkd3d-proton/blob/938d7... for example
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.