Technology

59985 readers

2566 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

350

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 1 week ago by [email protected] to c/technology

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Mistic 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week 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.