| ▲ | anilakar 6 hours ago |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | st_goliath 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| > 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... |
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| ▲ | necovek 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| 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? |
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| ▲ | dlcarrier 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I wouldn't be surprised if it made other games on the Source engine faster, but everything else slower. |
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| ▲ | limflick 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > to rename the game executable to hl2.exe This seems genuinely unbelievable. Does anyone have a technical explanation for this? |
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| ▲ | hurtigioll 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | ChocolateGod 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | |
| ▲ | tester756 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Who's problem is this? Nvidia probably doesnt officially say anything about this and 99.9% of people do not rename process name | | |
| ▲ | account42 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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. | | | |
| ▲ | limflick 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Phrasing, I wasn't blaming anyone, just curious about the technicalities. | |
| ▲ | hurtigioll 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 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 |
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| ▲ | proton_9 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| 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. |
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| ▲ | db48x 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Because everyone reported performance metrics using it as a benchmark. Higher number = more sales. | | |
| ▲ | murderfs 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | 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. | | |
| ▲ | jkrejcha 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | 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... | |
| ▲ | tester756 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | 5 or 50? I'd say 5 years ago it was already Witcher 3, Cyberpunk 2077, GTA 5, etc. | | |
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