To paraphrase - "The fact is that its faster, when people play the game thats the IQ they will get and they don't run it with mipmap levels on; apparantly real IQ doesn't matter to users just so long as it looks OK and plays fast."
This is a real damning path to go down. Now its a case that users shouldn't necessarily be presented with the actual IQ that these games boards have been sold as delivering just so long as its give passable IQ and good performance (or just enough to make it look good in the face of the competition). Apparantly users can't see the difference between real Trilinear and the "very close to Bilinear" that's being given on the detail textures - so what the point of having Trilinear at all now, eh?
Of course, there were the screenshots there to show the IQ delivered, but that was only a half assed job as its OK to say that one board "dominates" another without actually showing comparative IQ.
The precident that [H] is setting here is just utterly fucking sad and stupid - all ATI has to do is release a set of drivers that does exactly the same - dial down IQ to increase performance, and that ultimately puts us on a path that screws all consumers.
We'll also gloss over the fact that the situation here is exactly the same as the whole Quake/Quack fiasco - there [H] was willing to make a whole bunch of noise about that, but nary a peep when the shoe is on the other foot, which really leads you to only one conclusion.
