From the Benchmarks and Evaluation page:

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"First of all we noticed that the new 61.10 driver for the GeForce 6800 Ultra affected image quality in Far Cry by no longer slowly fading in far away objects such as grass, trees and mountains, but rather abruptly pop them in and out of view once you’re beyond a certain distance.
...
As mentioned further analysis is needed so figure out whether both ATi and Nvidia render all scenes fully and without using shortcuts that adversely affect image quality. "
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For me, this grass-thing is an *ugly* shortcut that I always thought about as the flaw of the 3D engine, not the graphics driver.

Now I'm in doubt if my good ol' TNT2Pro (remember? no shaders, not even T&L) pops up distant objects from thin air in Wizardry 8 due to wiz8 3d engine or NVidia's latest driver (iirc my dll version is still around 6.xx, even though it's the 52.xx driver pack)

As for the conclusion: it's amazing how top products are exactly on the same performance level. Choose by your heart. I'll still go for the one with the passive heatsink

I agree, that's a shortcut in my book also, but the 61.10 drivers have more issues, which is not entirely unexpected, but they're better than the 60.72 which don't run Far Cry too well due to a Z-culling buffer bug. Unlike ATi they have to code for an entirely new architecture, whereas ATi basically builds on previous code from previous architectures, in theory Nvidia has more headroom in drivers though. As for performance, neither architecture has sufficient headroom to leapfrog the other so they get as close to one another as possible, Nvidia took the plunge first and now ATi matched their performance.

Kind regards,

funny how ATI matched the Nvidia Card with an older architecture, oh BTW Sander there isnt a such thing as R360 Core just a R350 Core.

another thing using basically the same cooler from the 9800 XT, i guess Nvidia cheaps out on cooler design???

http://www.ati.com/products/radeonx800/subsite/index.html, go there, ATI now has a chic for their mascot, chics n katanas, HELLYA!!!

R360 is the core used on the 9600XT and 9800XT, R350 never made it to the market.

Kind regards,

well whats with the classification Sander of some of these utilities, they state R350