

AMD Catalyst Linux Driver Performs Differently Based on Program's Name - rkwasny
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/15/07/20/1233229/amd-catalyst-linux-driver-performs-wildly-different-based-on-programs-name

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aesthetics1
I believe this has been going on for a long time. There used to be an old
trick to get crossfire working for games that did not support it yet -- just
change the name of the .EXE to match a game that _did_ have support.

I do not think this is a case of "gaming benchmarks" \-- This is just AMD
trying to optimize gaming experiences based on the application.

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flxn
I'm a bit disappointed... After reading the title I was expecting some weird
string handling bugs in the driver that result in degraded performance when
there are certain character sequences in the file name ;)

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ris
Of course it does. This is one of the reasons proprietary drivers are so
"super-secret" and generally perform much better than open source drivers -
they're chock full of game-specific hacks.

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adultSwim
Yikes. Seems like they are trying to "game" benchmarks.

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paulmd
No, this is just how modern game drivers work nowadays [1]. With older APIs
(pre-Mantle/Vulkan/DX12) it's really opaque how to produce correct and
performant code. And even past that, AAA game devs have enough clout to
basically force hardware companies to fix their bugs, eg one major game never
made BeginFrame/EndFrame calls which is a horrendous violation of API rules.
You don't want to have "broken drivers" on launch day while it works on your
competitor's hardware.

This results in a game of pattycake where the game developers and the driver
developers are both guessing at what the other will do, and trying to optimize
for it. So game releases basically require having an NVIDIA/AMD developer sit
down, profile your code, and figure out which of the tens-to-hundreds of
thousands of behavior triggers and optimizations should be turned on for your
game.

What's probably going on here is that CS:GO is having a different set of
optimizations applied from its parent game (or hasn't had any at all applied
yet on Linux). The big question here is whether CS:GO actually works 100%
reliably on those settings, on all AMD GPUs, on all possible combinations of
graphics settings. Because it's very possible that it doesn't, or that no one
has verified that it does.

[1] [http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-
opinions-o...](http://www.gamedev.net/topic/666419-what-are-your-opinions-on-
dx12vulkanmantle/?view=findpost&p=5215019)

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smcl
Again? Didn't they get busted for this a few years back?

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kllrnohj
If by "a few years back" you mean 14 years ago with the quake/quack thing.

But nobody is saying this is the cheating-style "optimizing" which has been
judged as invalid. Both Nvidia and ATI do heavy amounts of game-specific
optimizations in drivers and so long as there is no visual difference this is
perceived to be fair and valid optimization.

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smcl
Yep, I posted the quake/quack thing including a link, a date and an "oops my
mistake" apologetic comment

