Anyone who's read Raymond Chen's blog, or ever encountered MKCOMPAT.EXE (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Compatible" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Make_Compatible</a>), will know that Windows is full of application-specific hacks to maintain compatibility. I suspect every complex system component has something similar for the same reasons. I doubt it's for any nefarious purpose.
How ATI’s drivers ‘optimize’ Quake III<p><a href="https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-atis-drivers-optimize-quake-iii/" rel="nofollow">https://techreport.com/review/3089/how-atis-drivers-optimize...</a><p>>Kyle Bennett at the HardOCP found that replacing every instance of “quake” with “quack” in the Quake III executable changed the Radeon 8500’s performance in the game substantially.
At least for graphics drivers it's common that the driver applies tons of game-specific workarounds and optimizations, I guess this is also the main reason why there are monthly driver updates (fixes for new games), and why graphics drivers have become so massively big.<p>Assuming that the same game-specific tweaking happens for CPU performance and compatibility doesn't seem like a far stretch.
Not going to speak to whether it's coincidence or intentional, but PCI could also mean "Program Compatibility Interface" or something like that.
I don't know why they need to disguise this driver, but every single GPU vendor does this, there's a reason nVidia heavily advertises "$LATEST_BIG_GAME Driver Support" every time a new AAA game comes out, it's all AppCompat flags, all the way down.
I remember these tricks being discovered as early as ~2000, and it's been a scandal every time it was found NVidia or ATI did it. Not much has changed over the past 20 years.
The game I work on is in the list and early on we saw a bunch of inexplicable crashes from Zen hardware (looking through the dumps we would see $rip had gotten itself into impossible places or we'd get exceptions at addresses that were not involved in the crashing thread).<p>As these crash faded from our bug leaderboard we assumed it was people upgrading their BIOS to get microcode fixes; I guess these runtime checks were a desperate attempt to avoid crashes in the interim? Windows Update is pretty bossy but it never demands that you update your BIOS.<p>How our game got on that list is baffling to me, though -- I don't know how AMD would have gotten the crash reports in the first place.