I remember reading the news bits that said they admitted to cheating, and there were articles that showed the issue, from reviewers, so it was in some form of shipping product. Thanks for the correction, but are you 100% sure?
Quite.
Link.
ATI says:
The current RADEON 8500 driver revision has an issue that prevents it from correctly interpreting the texture quality slider setting in Quake 3.
(The rest of the article is fairly useless conspiracy-mongering, though)