According to this long article at Digit-Life, even after all the talk about optimizing drivers for 3D Mark 03, both ATi, and nVidia, are both still using these methods, even on there new driver releases. After using the "AntiDetector" program, (blocks optimizations), in this article, nVidia lost over 1200 points and ATi lost almost 400, in 3D Mark 01.

This article at The Inquirer is not really about cheating, at least so far as can be proven now. I just thought I'd put it here rather than start a new thread. The jist of the story is nVidia has there newest "leaked" drivers out and they give a huge increase in 3DMark scores, but none whatsoever in real world games. The Extreme Tech article is here.

Well, some of the otimizations from 44.03 are still there...
According to B3D, there's still a clip plane in GT 2 (or was that 3 I don't remember)...

And another thing about those drivers... They're encrypted to make it harder/impossbile for people to do what Unwinder did with his AntiDetect script...

Way to go Nvidia...

Nvidia will likely go on cheating, and that most likely explains why they don't like the 'Omega' versions of their drivers, and put their foot down to get them removed.

I think the new Nvidia 44.67 drivers improve the code for DirectX9 stuff that isn't used in any of the games we currently play so you won't see a corresponding increase in game performance. I haven't yet run the DX9 GunMetal Demo or GunMetal Benchmark to test my theory though.

Edit: Just ran the game and it was smoother and more responsive. It seems to show an increase in framerates. The Benchmark shows about a 20-50% increase over the 44.65 drivers. Certainly looks less jerky on a FX5600.