ATi not providing AA for Starcraft 2

Unbelievable, I can't believe ATi would do something so dumb.

Via Guru3d:

Earlier last week we posted a GPU performance review on StarCraft II, we noted there that ATI Radeon cards for whatever reason do not support AA modes. ATI issued a statement on that, today StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty launches. Below is the 1:1 response that ATI has send out to some media:

AMD constantly strives to deliver great gaming experiences for our customers and the upcoming launch of Starcraft II is no exception. Blizzard’s focus on incredible game play for all, means that gamers using ATI Radeon(tm) products can enjoy smooth HD gameplay and industry leading image quality with our current generation of ATI Radeon products as well as many of our past generation cards.

In discussions during the development of StarCraft II, Blizzard indicated that they would not initially include options to set levels of in-game anti-aliasing (“AA”). This meant that support for AA within StarCraft II would only be made possible by including it in the driver, an approach that could significantly impact performance.

Some third party reviews of the Starcraft II beta echo our concerns that AA can cause gameplay impairment. In these reviews, the third parties found that 4x AA led to a reduction in fps rendering at lower screen resolutions, which only became more noticeable at larger resolutions.

After evaluating our options, our engineering team opted not to provide AA support for StarCraft II within the Catalyst Control Center, even though the competition has included AA support in their driver at launch.

We are committed to making AA perform at an acceptable level before we release it to our customers. We will continue to work with Blizzard on this matter and hope to offer our customers an acceptable AA solution at a later date.


Source: http://www.guru3d.com/news/ati-on- [...] g-support/

I can't tell if you're being sarcastic

How comes they didn't blame Nvidia for this or are they just working up to it?

IIRC Batman uses the Unreal engine which does not have AA built in so the code was not "included", Nvidia provided code for AA on Nvidia cards and ATi just wanted to use that code because they were unable/unwilling to provide their own. As for this title it seems that AA works just fine on Nvidia cards but again not so with ATi and the Guru3D site reckon it's ATi's fault.

Not by default is the code included but the developer included code, standard code that nvidia provided them to make it work which was prohibited by nvidia from working on ati's cards.

This I believe is different, this would be more a driver work around. Either way it is not the gpu designers job to include it. The batman case was not something that should be repeated due to the underhand tactics that were being used.

Saying they are using a deferred rendering engine is not an excuse, other companies have managed to include AA just fine, again, a trend like this should not continue.