The sampling patterns in ATi cards from the Radeon 9500 and up are
programmable. In fact, "temporal AA" works by employing two different
sampling patterns every other frame to create the illusion of greater line
smoothness. When nVidia introduced transparency AA on the Geforce7, ATi
brought forth Adaptive AA in a driver update, but made it retroactive on all
the 9x00 cards.

ATi may very well claim DX10.1 compliance when the HD 2900 launches, much
like it claimed DX8.1 compliance with the Radeon 8500. (It gave the 8500 a
paper advantage over the DX8.0-compliant Geforce3, with no developer support
except from Futuremark.)

--
"War is the continuation of politics by other means.
It can therefore be said that politics is war without
bloodshed while war is politics with bloodshed."

"noman" wrote in message
...
One of the features in DX10.1 is that developers can pick the aliasing
pattern they want based on the rendered scene. So instead of, let's
say, a box pattern, with corners averaged onto the centre of the box,
one can pick all four samples in a straight line.

Of course, this will require support from the hardware. As far as I
know, the sampling patterns for multi-sampling in the current graphic
chipsets are all hard-coded, instead of being programmable.
--
Noman