News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cutlass" in it. Parent comment

Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by mattlondon on Friday October 03, 2025 @04:21AM (#45460415)
Just in case anyone else parsed that sentence the same way as me, ati detected "quake" as the executable and changed things like texture quality etc to increase benchmark performance. Some people discovered this after they renamed the executable to "quack" and the image quality improved but the benchmarks were lower, proving that the ati drivers "optimised" by reducing quality.

Ati did not rename quake to quack as I originally thought from this! :)

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by a_wild_dandan on Friday October 03, 2025 @04:39AM (#45460541)
Thank you for explaining. I was so confused at how AMD was improving Quake performance with duck-like monikers.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by stavros on Friday October 03, 2025 @05:49AM (#45461028)
Well, if it _looks_ like a high-performance texture renderer, and it _walks_ like a high-performance texture renderer...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by _joel on Friday October 03, 2025 @08:18AM (#45462081)
It's probably been duck typed
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by tbalsam on Friday October 03, 2025 @09:12AM (#45462611)
shocked quack
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by taneq on Friday October 03, 2025 @09:54AM (#45463064)
If it looks like a benchmark and it quacks like a benchmark… duck?
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by Dwedit on Friday October 03, 2025 @11:11AM (#45463882)
The story was that they used a lower mipmap level (blurrier textures) when the process was named Quake, but used the normal mipmap level (standard textures) when the process was named Quack.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Fp8 runs ~100 tflops faster when the kernel name has "cut... by robotresearcher on Friday October 03, 2025 @01:16PM (#45465248)
So the additional performance came with a large bill?
[ Parent | on HN ]