I don't think the GeForce DDR had a DXTC "bug". I think they decoded dxt1 to 16bit rgb instead of 32bit rgba like everybody else. Thus the banding this caused was by design, not a bug.
The AF of r200 was indeed bad. The angle dependency would have been quite acceptable at that time, but the problem was that it could only do "bilinear AF" (so all samples from the same mipmap). As an upside, there was generally not really a performance loss to ordinary trilinear sampling, though arguably the quality wasn't really better neither... Though personally I thought the radeon 9000 (rv250) was a much better card all things considered. Not much more than half the transistors with ~85% the performance, only cutting nearly useless stuff like TruForm, and without any problems at all with its (multi monitor) outputs. But obviously this couldn't keep up with GeForce 4 neither.
The AF of r200 was indeed bad. The angle dependency would have been quite acceptable at that time, but the problem was that it could only do "bilinear AF" (so all samples from the same mipmap). As an upside, there was generally not really a performance loss to ordinary trilinear sampling, though arguably the quality wasn't really better neither... Though personally I thought the radeon 9000 (rv250) was a much better card all things considered. Not much more than half the transistors with ~85% the performance, only cutting nearly useless stuff like TruForm, and without any problems at all with its (multi monitor) outputs. But obviously this couldn't keep up with GeForce 4 neither.