Rys - B3D
Hardware resolve is actually done in the ROP on R600, but only for fully compressed tiles. I write that in the article. So I don't need to state that it was the plan to use the ROP for downsampling, because that's actually what's happening (unless you argue that reading just one value doesn't count, because there was no math involved to weight other samples) for one case.
And I also say that I lean towards the case that the hardware is broken because they have to downsample on the shader core for non fully compressed tiles, even if they can pass the decompressed samples back with a fast path.