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Carmack On ATI's Driver Modifications

Posted by michael on from the little-things-mean-a-lot dept.

CitizenC points out that John Carmack's .plan file has been updated to discuss ATI's driver optimizations. If you weren't paying attention, ATI put code in their drivers to optimize for Quake3, based on the name of the executable - so when running Quake3, you'd get a (good) set of optimizations for the game, but when running the same game after changing the name of the executable, you'd get a default set of optimizations with lesser performance. Some people called this cheating since Quake3 is a typical benchmark application these days.

4 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Carmack's Conclusion by mESSDan · · Score: 5, Funny

    Basically, here's the gist of what Carmack said:

    Uhh, it's bad, but don't quote me on that.

    --

    -- Dan
  2. just rename everything ... by freaker_TuC · · Score: 5, Funny

    So I need to rename all my games, Simcity, Theme Hospital, UT, to quake3.exe to get a optimized version ? :o)

    cd \sc2000
    ren simcity.exe quake3.exe
    cd \hospital
    ren theme.exe quake3.exe
    cd \ut
    ren unreal.exe quake3.exe
    ...

    (already can see it happen!)

    --
    --- I am known for the ones who want to find me on the net. Is that a privacy risk or a privilege? One might wonder..
  3. Poor unfortunates! by TheSHAD0W · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'm sure those people who play Quake 3 will be VERY unhappy about getting better performance. :-)~

  4. Re:.plan by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    And you are a Windows user, ain'tcha? :P