The title is a bit clickbait but nice article ;) This is widespread in API-level software, from OSes to GPU drivers. I'm not sure how documented this is but you can find interesting stuff by renaming your exe to Quake, or FIFA, or Minecraft or whatever.

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Dwedit 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Back in 2001, ATI got in some hot water after it was revealed that they intentionally blurred all textures (used a lower resolution mipmap) if you were running Quake 3 Arena. Changing all strings from "Quake" to "Quack" (including renaming the executable) disabled the degraded mipmaps, and improved the graphics (and reduced framerates).

https://web.archive.org/web/20190728022442/https://techrepor...

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flohofwoe 9 hours ago | parent [-]

Meanwhile today, graphics driver tweaks for specific games has become a regular feature and is advertised in the driver release notes (and I guess that's one reason why graphics drivers have become so massively big).

	▲	typpilol 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I can't remember where I heard this from but I remember a talk from some guy from the DirectX team and he said that so many games use completely illegal and unsupported/weird API options and calls. He said that's what 99% of the game optimizations are. Putting stuff in place to fix broken API stuff.

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VectorLock 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sounds pretty click-baity but if a company put the name of my software on an opaque list that ships with the OS that makes my software behave differently than I expect it to and didn't even TELL ME about it I'd be way WAY more pissed than this guy is.

	▲	Yeask an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Drivers do this to every single videogame. And it is good, otherwise those game would not run in every consumer 3d card.

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HeliumHydride 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

TrickNvidiaDriversForPerformance_javaw.exe.minecraft.exe

	▲	Pannoniae 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Hey, that was the Intel driver! ;)

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georgemcbay 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Its also not surprising to anyone who spent time reading Raymond Chen's The Old New Thing blog posts back in the day, a lot of them were about these rather absurd hoops Microsoft was always jumping through to increase backward and forward compatibility with these sorts of tricks.

It may have lead to an unfortunate situation for this developer in this one very niche corner case, but overall it has been wildly beneficial for users over the years (decades even) to have most software Just Work regardless of how deprecated the underlying APIs they were built on are now.