Quite a few of you will still remember ATi's 'pre-launch' of Radeon 8500 on August 14, 2001. On the evening of the same day, I received an email from NVIDIA that went like this:
From August 14, 2001:
Hey man,
thanks for the mention in your article
. Long time no talk to. You need to get over here and see our new offices, LOTS of new software labs.
[..]
finally, one thing I have heard from a developer that I know you might find interesting for your site. They did a text search on the R200 drivers and see a string in the OGL driver called "Quake 3". Why does drivers have the name of an app in the driver itself? Without being called an accuser, I can say we don't have quake3 in our OpenGL driver and if we did, it would be so that we could detect the application.
Further, if you rename quake3 binary to quack.exe AND use a binary editor to edit quake3.exe and search and replace all strings of "Quake 3" to "Quack 3". Doing so will cause a driver that is doing app detection to get much lower quake3 scores since the detection mechanism won't work. Note that you must change "quake 3" in multiple places within the quake3 binary. Just use a binary editor to change them all. In theory, one could also edit the driver that has the offending string and change that with a binary editor but we have not tried that here.
Check this out and let me know if you have any questions. Seemed pretty odd to me.
take care and see you soon,
I thought "Aha! ATi is cheating. Let's have a look!" I checked it out and indeed, there was something cheesy going on. However, I did not consider the issue serious enough. In fact, I was a bit irritated by the fact that the information about it had come from NVIDIA. If I picked up on this issue, I had to tell the world that it came from NVIDIA and I would do nothing but NVIDIA's marketing job. I also expected ATi to eventually remove the offending stuff from their drivers. Basically, I considered this material dirty laundry and refrained from picking up on it, even though NVIDIA kept pushing me. By October 2001, NVIDIA had created a little program ("quackifier.exe") that made it pretty easy to see ATi's little Quake3-cheat. Here's an excerpt of the note that I received along with it:
From October 16, 2001:
Detecting Quake
The Radeon8500 drivers appear to be detecting the string "quake" in the Quake 3 Arena benchmark. Normally, this can easily be discovered by merely renaming the quake3 executable. In this case, however, it appears that the driver is detecting the quake string in the registry and within the executable itself. The attached executable called "quackifier.exe" will modify the quake3 executable, and replace every instance of "quake" with "quack". Here's how it is used:
1. Copy the Quackifier.exe program to the Quake3 folder where the Quake3.exe is located.
2. Launch the Quackifier.exe program. The Quack3.exe program will be created automatically in a couple of seconds.
3. Run Quack3 w/ the same settings as Quake3.
Comparing the performance values generated by "Quack" vs. "Quake", there is a clear performance drop with Quack. This performance difference illustrates that the ATI driver is actually keying off the "quake" string.
I still didn't change my stance. This was dirty laundry and I didn't want to have anything to do with it.
