definitely cheating

Q3 is old by computer game standards, and my personal opinion is that it is no longer useful as a benchmark (of course, I never bought it and played it, either). The difference between 100 fps and 200 fps is negligible to a human. I know people said the same about 30 vs. 60 fps, but over 100 fps the human eye physically has trouble detecting a change (MS knows more about this than I).

Don't forget that Q3 is also one of the very few OpenGL games. There probably would not be any OpenGL games if id software didn't keep it alive. I'm not saying that's good or bad, but it does mean that Q3 performance doesn't mean squat for a game that's not on the Q3 engine.

ATI knows Q3 is a popular benchmark and they want to put up a good showing. When they look good in 1 instance and bad in the rest, though, something is rotten. ATI has sucked @$$ on drivers for years. They need to get serious with some nVidia-style driver development or focus on multimedia and quit wasting gamers' time.