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.