Comment by sigmoid10

The other commenter makes it sound a bit more crazy than it is. "Intercept shaders" sounds super hacky, but in reality, games simply don't ship with compiled shaders. Instead they are compiled by your driver for your exact hardware. Naturally that allows the compiler to perform more or less aggressive optimisations, similar to how you might be able to optimise CPU programs by shipping C code and only compiling everything on the target machine once you know the exact feature sets.