Comment by dahauns

Aah, that brings back memories...

Interestingly, most benchmark controversies back in the day are now expected behaviour, i.e. game-specific optimizations with no (well, in this age of upscalers and other lossy optimization techniques, probably even somewhat) visible image degradation. A gaming-specific driver with no game-specific improvements in its changelog would be considered strange, and it very much works with executable detection.

Back in the day, there was still the argument that drivers should not optimize for benchmarks even when visually identical, because it wouldn't show the hardware's real world potential. Kinda cute from today's perspective. :)

But of course there were the obvious cases...

The Quack3 lowering filtering quality as shown above, of course (at least that one was put into the driver as a togglable setting later on).

But the most cheeky one has to be nVidia's 3dmark03 "optimizations", where they blatantly put static clip planes into the scenes so that everything outside the predefined camera path from the benchmark sequence would simply be cut from the scene early (which e.g. fully broke the freelook patched into 3dmark and would generally break any interactive application)