As you recall, I wrote an article benchmarking the 4850. One of the benchmarks used was Furmark, and I commented on how performance left something to be desired, and scaling in AA was terrible.
It turns out it was, as a I suspected, a driver problem. But what I hadn’t suspected was that they did in on purpose.
It appears that since Furmark is stressful enough to crash ATI cards, they reduced performance to stop that form happening.
And when you change the executable name, performance goes back to normal.
This is completely unacceptable. With this and Nvidia’s g84/g92/g94 fiasco, I’m really hoping Intel or S3 produces a competitive card. Cause I’m starting to hate both of the big 2.
Source: expreview