ATI Bug or Something More Sinister?
Ryan over at PC Perspective has stumbled across a very controversial discovery when testing a Radeon X1950 XTX graphics card for another review. Here, Ryan found that the standard Radeon X1950 XTX was really using 2xAA when the user selects 4xAA in OpenGL games such as Prey, Doom3, and Quake 4! The interesting part here (and possibly incriminating) is that the Crossfire version of the Radeon X1950 XTX operated properly and used 4xAA when it was selected. Could this be a driver bug or possibly be ATI taking advantage of reviewers only testing with popular FSAA modes such as 4xAA? We're not sure, though we are anxious to hear what ATI thinks of this issue.
Whether or not this was an accidental bug or something else, there are probably numerous reviews online about the X1950 XTX cards that need to be re-evaluated, my own included. Any readers or reviewers that were overly impressed by the X1950 XTX's performance in OpenGL applications (possibly just limited to the Doom 3 engine) need to run these kinds of tests themselves to see if their results are tainted by this error. Hopefully ATI will address this issue quickly and in the right manor!
