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Comment by torginus | Hacker News Reader

Every vendor does this to this day - and its a morally grey practice, drivers hijack and modify the rendering loops of popular games, fixing bugs, replacing shaders with more optimized versions, enabling faster codepaths in the driver etc.

These changes are supposed to have minimal to no impact on the actual output, but sometimes vendors are really aggressive, and significantly degrade the outputs so that the game can run faster on their hardware.

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Sadly it's built into the vulkan protocol. Even a fully userspace driver arrangement with a microkernel ends up giving the driver access to the client's information. Of course it's forgeable the way it's done though so you could opt out if you really wanted to.

[1]: https://github.com/KhronosGroup/Vulkan-Headers/blob/main/inc...

I mean Khronos put that in for a reason. If the drivers didn't get explicit information about the application being run, they would do silly heuristics like quake3 to squeeze out performance.

> but sometimes vendors are really aggressive, and significantly degrade the outputs so that the game can run faster on their hardware.

Do you have a source for this? I’d like to see some examples

Nvidia has a control panel with it's drivers. Open it up -> Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings. Scroll through and see how every single program/game you have installed openly has different defaults in it based on application name. As someone noted above others do the same thing.

Eg. Frostpunk has Antialiasing for transparency layers on. Slay the spire does not. I never set these settings. Nvidia literally does a lookup on first run for what they judge as best defaults and sets these appropriately.

Every single game/program you install has different options from a huge list of possible optimizations.

Applying different standard settings is pretty different from "hijacking and modifying the rendering loop", though.

In what sense? The render loop is modified from “the” default without user or program opt-in, and “hijacking” is what it would be called if anyone but Nvidia did it — so Nvidia is not exempt from that use. Though: Runtime patch, haxie, hijack, LD_PRELOAD, system extension; the noun changes every few years, so perhaps it’s time for a new one. Override?

But the comment I replied to wasn’t talking about runtime patching or any of the other settings you mentioned. It was talking about changing GPU settings for specific programs. Not changing anything about the program itself.

That’s not what @torginus was referring to. There’s nothing wrong with having and exposing application specific settings. There’s nothing wrong with drivers having application specific optimization patches either, but that’s a very different thing.

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