It has been stated over and over again, to which some chose to deliberately ignore, or just for some reason fail to understand, that the optimization was not there before with 10.9 with the 5XXX AMD cards, and that this approach was the agreed upon stance between AMD and Nvidia when sending samples out to review
This is the first I have ever heard of AMD and Nvidia having an agreement on card settings. Do you have a source for this?
Either way, as others have stated, what optimizations are enabled by default should be at the sole discretion of the companies producing the cards. If AMD decides something Nvidia has chosen not to turn on at default settings will in fact provide a better experience to the vast majority of gamers--let alone with such a negligible loss of quality--it would be a travesty to forbid it just because "no one else is using it." Again, what percent of users ever open the control panel, let alone understand the settings, let alone change them around?
If your target is your average customer, turning on ASO in your default settings is the right choice, period.
Hilbert at Guru3D, whose reputation in the community is rock solid, agrees that it is there, and even though it hard to see (just the same as when NV has their ASO enabled) and doesn't degrade IQ, it does make giving a proper, objective, comparitive review impossible when driver defaults are loaded. Thus AMD needs to disable the ASO and go back how they were before with Cat 10.9., andd that is how it should be, and the community should demand it as well so as to maintain the integrity of the reviews else no one will be able to look at a review and trust what they are looking at. That is, no one who cares about objectivity that is.
I agree with a need for objective comparison, but the tools are there to make this happen in the High Quality settings. Further, demanding a change to
default settings which will affect the entire userbase to satisfy a handful of tech sites is something I very, very strongly disagree with. AMD needs to provide a setting where all optimizations are off for benchmarking, and that is all. Telling ATI to turn default settings on or off depending on what Nvidia does or doesn't is the most inane thing I've ever heard.
AMD should have been way more forthcoming about this, no question. But these tech sites demanding changes to defaults when there
are equivalent settings are ridiculous as well. If card makers shipped everything with benchmarking and a handful of reviewers in mind rather than their general userbase, well...I don't see how anyone can argue for that being
preferable. It's such a backwards thing to suggest,
especially when the image comparison shots prove there are obviously very differing optimizations being used under the hood by both camps already, setting ASO completely aside.
tl;dr -
Basically what MrK6 and railven said.