Yeah, I don't know why the drivers for this rather common video card were left out of Leopard, but obviously they were. Somebody at Apple goofed?
No, Leopard has all the required ATI video extensions. I think when he said he used an alternate "driver" (meaning software extension or kext) he really meant he used an alternate firmware (called "ROM" in the Mac ATI world, and "BIOS" in the PC ATI world). Many of the ATI "driver" installers simultaneously update the firmware on the card. I suspect that if you did a software installation, you may actually have downgraded your "drivers" to something of 2005 vintage while updating your card's firmware. It's likely that the firmware update was the cause of the artifact fix.
Blocky video artifacts are often caused by the card's firmware being "overclocked", meaning the firmware is set to run the GPU too fast for the VRAM chips on the card. The solution is to slow down the GPU to a speed that matches the VRAM chip specifications. You can alternatively use 3rd-party software like ATIccelerator II to set the speed of the GPU & VRAM via a System Preferences Preference Pane. This can be handy if you're not comfortable changing the speed in firmware and would rather over-ride the firmware setting manually via a Preference Pane rather than flashing the firmware.
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