I wanted to express my sincere thanks for the posting of this information. For those interested, I'm truly unable to notice a difference on my end after making the unofficial patches necessary to access the filtering. However, it looks like this could become a "big deal" very soon for those looking to improve their 5XXX series cards on games and graphics. Nice find, truly will look forward to the next driver release which will officially unlock it. I think if the promise of less resource consumption is for real, you will see some MMORPGs make use of it like Word of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. I mention the latter because I've tried it, and the graphics are absolutely breath-taking. It is the most ambitious MMO I have seen in a long time, and features truly beautiful and breathtaking landscapes and visuals. I could see them adding support for it to make the game use less GPU resources. Surely WoW might take advantage for their millions of customers. I think of a lot of "living games" as the ones that are patched a lot and would introduce it if its practical. Games that are released late in this year and older games may be patched to support the feature under native settings, if it is attractive enough to improve scaling for those on low-end hardware.
Here's my take: I tested the new feature on my ATI Radeon 5870. Since buying a Samsung monitor everything I do is in full HD. I stick to the same few games these days - as my time is short, but when I have it, I'm going to go all out on long-lasting games. My favorite is easily the Fallout series, so I tried this on there by disabling in-game AA and applying the max settings in the Catalyst Control Center (CCC). I could not notice a difference, but this may be one of those games where you won't. I'm not sure if running the textures at such a high res. has something to do with it. These days, its very common that the textures are rendered in HD to begin with and scaled down for lower resolution monitors.
I can't tell if using this feature reduces GPU resource consumption, because generally I don't measure it to begin with. It would be great if some people who do heavy benchmarking on their video graphics cards could come by and do some thorough comparisons. To compliment this great find, and new feature, we need some Radeon users who run benchmarks frequently to see what the impact is. I'm sure it must provide some benefit. I will usually jump on something like this when there is a hint of a big performance boost. The system I am using right now is such a powerhouse to begin with, that I honestly cannot determine any difference. However, I am sure someone will start number crunching soon. Excellent find and post.
I found the instructions a bit confusing on what to do, as they are spread amongst multiple sites and needed files. For AMD/ATI Radeon Series 5 owners, be sure to read carefully. Updating to 10.10a is not going to help you if you have the 5XXX series cards. 10.10a was released after 10.10, for clarification. It activates this for 6-series cards and has an unsigned driver. 5XXX series card owners: You must replace the INF files in the setup folder before running the setup for 10.10a. You must then restart to see the feature in the Catalyst Control Panel. You do this by downloading 10.10a and replacing the default INFs in the subdirs with the ones supplied on the links kemical threw up.
Because I did not notice a massive improvement, and because I am not big into benchmarks, I would recommend that those who may find these instructions confusing wait it out until the next version of the drivers, which will likely have support for this feature for the Radeon 5-series cards.