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A Valve engineer fixed 3D lighting so hard he had to tell all the graphics card manufacturers their math was wrong, and the reaction was: 'I hate you' (www.pcgamer.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by pookie@lemmy.blahaj.zone to c/technology@lemmy.world

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/34328210

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[–] Mistic@lemmy.world 15 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

I have a good guess on how this would actually happen:

PM: We need this

Specialist: makes this (doesn't check results)

QC: Looks good (but doesn't actually check)

Some updates later may further break the functionality. And as long as numbers aren't blatantly wrong (think 0s everywhere, for example) and nobody checks thoroughly enough, the issue will remain.

I have unfortunate experience of being a part of such a story, haha. There are ways to counter it. Mainly, their project documentation either wasn't up to par or wasn't used as a reference during creation and tests. Either way, it's negligence.

[–] BlackLaZoR@fedia.io 3 points 2 weeks ago

I imagine in case of GPU design, there should be a bunch of tests for image correctness at some point, which would require pixel perfect reproduction to pass.

But it's plausible that tests were running incorrect math too.