Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
1–10 of 39 posts
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#2Seems like the hashes are being cracked and refer to games, mostly.
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#3I bet they are cheating on benchmarks.
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#4I remember these tricks being discovered as early as ~2000, and it's been a scandal every time it was found NVidia or ATI did it. Not much has changed over the past 20 years.
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#5I bet they are cheating on benchmarks.
Maybe. But it's more likely they're replacing shaders with game- or engine-specific workarounds for hardware bugs. Used to do exactly that in my first GPU driver job. The goal wasn't to cheat, but to fix issues in popular games that for one reason or another wouldn't be patched for your GPU on its release.
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#6Seems like the hashes are being cracked and refer to games, mostly.
Reminds me about a story from years ago where someone fixed bugs in a video game only by renaming the executable to doom3.exe
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#7I bet they are cheating on benchmarks.
Maybe. But it's more likely they're replacing shaders with game- or engine-specific workarounds for hardware bugs. Used to do exactly that in my first GPU driver job. The goal wasn't to cheat, but to fix issues in popular games that for one reason or another wouldn't be patched for your GPU on its release.
Anyway, they made insanely stupid implementation now. With unforgivable security flaws. :(
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#8Anyone who's read Raymond Chen's blog, or ever encountered MKCOMPAT.EXE (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Compatible), will know that Windows is full of application-specific hacks to maintain compatibility. I suspect every complex system component has something similar for the same reasons. I doubt it's for any nefarious purpose.
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#9I remember these tricks being discovered as early as ~2000, and it's been a scandal every time it was found NVidia or ATI did it. Not much has changed over the past 20 years.
They had to work around bugs in games and even Windows had hard coded fixes for things like use after free errors in SimCity2000. The scandal was when they were caught using that to reduce render quality in benchmarks to get better results.
Re: Disguised “AMD PCI Driver” enables executable-specific hacks
#10I bet they are cheating on benchmarks.
Maybe. But it's more likely they're replacing shaders with game- or engine-specific workarounds for hardware bugs. Used to do exactly that in my first GPU driver job. The goal wasn't to cheat, but to fix issues in popular games that for one reason or another wouldn't be patched for your GPU on its release.
I wonder why they don't just call the game developers on the phone and say "here is AMD, you must fix your shaders, here is the code". Certainly I would jump if I got contacted by AMD or NVIDIA.
Now someone is going to say, if a game breaks people are going to blame AMD, so it is their problem. But AMD would just have to play hardball once, pick a smallish publisher and say "XY refuses to fix their broken code, we even did the work for them, we don't reccommend buying their games".