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Comment by limflick | Hacker News Reader

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limflick·

> to rename the game executable to hl2.exe

This seems genuinely unbelievable. Does anyone have a technical explanation for this?

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gpu drivers detect games, among other thing by looking at executable names

then driver "optimizes" behavior, sometimes dishonestly (reducing precision), sometimes honestly (working around game engine stupidity)

Couldn't that also cause glitches since optimizations meant for HL2 might not work for, say San Andreas? I understand some optimizations might be universal but I can't help but think about unexpected behavior.

Who's problem is this?

Nvidia probably doesnt officially say anything about this and 99.9% of people do not rename process name

of course they do.

nvidia even has an official api for a game to identify itself so they dont need to look at executable name

Phrasing, I wasn't blaming anyone, just curious about the technicalities.

It's definitely Nvidia's problem if this breaks something. Nothing in the D3D/OpenGL specs says that you can (not) use certain executable names.

Yeah, I'm sure NVIDIA is going to get around to "fixing" a decade's old industry standard for something that contributes less than 10% of their revenue.

Yes.

A lot of people use Nvidia profile inspector to enable reBar on all games and claim that Nvidia is purposely holding back performance, but doing this causes many games to crash.

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