At first, it looked completely black, but upon close inspection you could see little tiny points of color. If this image was never loaded, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between the two. The demo was performed with a few other pictures as well, with the same results. Then they showed a screen where they loded 40 completely different 256x256 24bit textures into 2MB of RAM, then scaled and rotated them. Shows bilinear filtering on the Savage3D. Note the pixel dancing.
Texture compression is only good if developers support it.
True enough, but the Savage 3D will compress textures for any game upon load and store them on the hard disk in compressed format, which copies directly into RAM without modification. They're trying to convince game developers to actually just store their textures pre-compressed and uncompress them on the first load for other cards, since it's so easy to do and saves CD storage space.