Just in case anyone else parsed that sentence the same way as me, ati detected "quake" as the executable and changed things like texture quality etc to increase benchmark performance. Some people discovered this after they renamed the executable to "quack" and the image quality improved but the benchmarks were lower, proving that the ati drivers "optimised" by reducing quality.
Ati did not rename quake to quack as I originally thought from this! :)
The story was that they used a lower mipmap level (blurrier textures) when the process was named Quake, but used the normal mipmap level (standard textures) when the process was named Quack.
Ati did not rename quake to quack as I originally thought from this! :)