NVIDIA fix texture shimmering issue

After our story on Friday evening that reported that there were problems with the texture filtering on NVIDIA's GeForce 7 series video cards, we managed to speak to NVIDIA on Monday and they sent us a driver over that fixed the issue with texture shimmering.

At this moment in time, we are not sure when this driver update, Forceware 78.03, will be released to the public via NZone, but we do know that it will be released soon enough.

One thing that we can confirm is that there isn't the 30% performance drop that was displayed in the Computerbase article that we linked in our previous report. It seems that it was a bug that got through the Q/A labs when the 77.77 driver was released on the GeForce 7800 GT's launch day.

We have seen a small performance drop that will not affect the in-game settings for your favorite games. You can, however, enjoy the games without the rather bizarre flickering textures now. In the High Quality setting, it seemed like all of the flickering had been removed, while the Quality setting now had greatly reduced flickering that only came about in very extreme circumstances.

There seems to be slightly less texture filtering going on, but without the majority of the flickering in 'Quality' mode - check out the screens below from Battlefield 2's fushe_pass map for the differences between the two drivers. It might be that my screens are not with the character standing in 100% the same spot - I've got as close as possible, though to give you a rough idea of the differences in filtering.

High Quality mode:

Quality mode:

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