Max Payne 2 raises a different question altogether. Its not synthetic and its really a user experience issue. When your playing away at 100+ fps I have to be honest and say that its not a noticeable change in IQ over the Radeon. You’d be hard pushed to say which image is optimised with the mipmap square. To me though, its not a matter of what I can see so much as the fact that this changing of textures is happening behind the users back. I have selected maximum quality on my £400 graphics card and I fully expect it to have Max Quality…not lesser quality than a much cheaper competitiors product.

The final issue is why have Futuremark stated that these drivers should be considered as approved? Its very clear to me that the 6800Ultra is not rendering the reference image as desired by 3Dmark, regardless of any performance impact and therefore isnt comparable to any other card. This in result is no different to the optimisations in previous drivers which Futuremark have frowned upon.