Hey there,
Firstly, the situation : Many cards and versions of the driver have trouble(listed below) with id tech4 based engine games. These problems also exist in other games and are remedied by disabling Surface Format Optimization - or on older cards/drivers Catalyst AI (I assume the former is implied by this).
The problems for most people are :
- Cubemaps lose their orientation and become inverted (Vertically flipped -> DirectX style). The cubemap is also being compressed when it is not desired.
- Extremely slow mipmap generation on load (When disabled they still work)
- Postprocessing results in an inverted render (RTT) (might be due to the aforementioned orientation issue - frame debug doesn't really seem to indicate it tho)
- Lower quality texturing (DXT compression when not explicitly required)
While a few of these can be worked around, the problem is detecting and then fixing them automatically, this is near impossible. As I have said, disabling SFO/CatAI fixes all of the problems and results in the render being correct, and without any degradation of performance — checked against nVidia and even Intel.
So, instead of annoying players, begging them that they should disable this and trying to say that it's not our fault - is there a way to inform the driver that this process does not want to be automagically broken by its assumed 'optimizations' . I have tried to look around the various bits of this badly laid out, over-complex and script abusing site and found no solution. So, after registering for this terrible to browse and search forum; I have come seeking answers to this most vexing of issues. How can I tell it to just leave everything alone and run happily as it does when disabled?
Considering the number of posts on other forums from developers saying the exact same thing, I expect this might be rather a good idea to make more visible...
That or we can all just start putting up nasty banners — not all media is good media 
Unrelated — Seriously, BSD driver wouldn't hurt either.
Thanks Kristen,
However, considering that I have both submitted the information, and got players to submit it to that public source over the last two years; I am unsure of its efficacy. Making things public, and a system for the great unwashed to report problems with games does not exactly inspire confidence.
The problem also exists in many games and application; topics telling people to "disable Catalyst AI" cover innumerable support threads, forum posts, official release notes etc. So I'm pretty sure that the issue is over-reported and considering the solution is never going to be perfect with an automatic system, having the ability to entirely disable it would be extremely useful.
On the other hand - thanks for the quick response and keeping an eye out 
