Hardware Analysis has their take on Nvidia's driver "optimizations". Its unfortunate that every time Nvidia releases a new product this occurs. Good product, bad product, or in the middle, it presents a doubt over the quality and actual performance of the product.
I'm sure you've read reports around the web about Nvidia allegedly cheating with their yet to be released 60.72 build drivers. These drivers were sent out to journalists evaluating the new GeForce 6800 Ultra and the NV4x architecture. Just two short weeks after the first reviews were posted one website published a lengthy article discussing image quality and how some frames rendered by the new GeForce showed differences from the same frames rendered on ATi hardware. So is this the proverbial smoking gun we're looking at, is Nvidia indeed making shortcuts to boost the performance of their new architecture or is something else going on here?