Recent tests made by online magazine Chip.de reveal that Forceware beta drivers v.61.11 that were supplied by NVIDIA to compare against Radeon X800s during this first week of reviews, carry some game-specific optimizations, the german testers noticed a sharp decrease on average FPS when they renamed the executable file of the popular first person shooter Far Cry (example: "Fartcry.exe").
Unfortunately we have no GeForce 6800 to verify this information or to show any image quality comparison (optimized vs. unoptimized) but most likely more on the subject will come up very soon. We had heard already from various reviewers that NVIDIA used a "brilinear" hybrid filtering mode that improved performance by a small margin by sacrificing some quality.
This may seem to be an endless debate, whether you will accept game-specific performance optimizations for a rather small loss in graphics quality, or should manufacturers retain "virgin" settings with the option of turning on these optimizations?
I have a very clear answer for that, now the questions would be, should NVIDIA (or any other manufacturer) be blamed for such practices?