This morning I got a PM from AMDs Zhen (who has been checking on the bug http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1849) answering my last question (in the bug report) that says:
Thanks Daniel.
I hope this bug could be fixed in the next catalyst so :)
Really good news.
Eventhough they won't resolve the issue in the next version, it is good to know that Ati is aware of this problem. We only need to wait.
This bug has appeared at my HD4850 since 10.04 IIRC. ATi messed with OGL driver part, so some other OGL based games have glitches now too. IL-2 for instance.
I have reported that bug to ATi too, so Im glad that they are gonna fix it :)
H20, you are not the only one who has problems with latest Catalyst driver, it is also not restricted to Linux'es, the problems extends to any graphic card that uses latest ATI driver, I have 3 ATI graphic cards and I've updated them to 10.6, the models are 3830, 4850 and a 4830. All of them show these bugs, with minor diffs between each model, in the 4850 the textures have a stripped but aluminum appearance, and in the 4830 they are gray with aluminum appearance without any strip of the actual texture.
I don't know where to report this bug to ATI, so if any of you are familiar with ATI reports, pls post here, I'll be gladly collaborating on reporting it as well..
/edit btw I don't know why BA uses dds textures, they are well known for causing clipping and FPS reduction
I see nothing in the design spec nor among reputable websites asserting that the fairly common use of DDS textures cause either clipping or a drop in FPS. They are certainly less than convenient to work with, and the compression/mipmapping isn't suited for all purposes.