Ok, just taking a quick check during lunch. I'll se what I can address in about 5 mins.
After having read your initial post I think you misunderstand what was my area of contention with entium's 'arguments', and it's not to say that SM3.0 doesn't have an effect, just that certain statements don't match the facts, and the realityu is SM3.0 didn't enter that equation until later. At issue is not is there improvement, it's more about how much that slight improvement in one game right now, affects the landscape.
An increase of 21.2%
Not to shabby in my book?
You,re right (except that you mis-transposed the numbers it's 303 for SM3.0 not 202

), it's a good increase, but remember it's a benchmark and meant to always be stressing the card as much as it can. Games on the other hand have different areas of load, and that's what I was talking about, if you see only select areas of increase which was the case in some game test, then it may be the select few instances that the nV selected tests are focusing on, whereas global increase may be limited even within the game itself. There are obvious areas, but looking at the myriad of reviews the advanatage is not global, as there are still areas where the increase is minor because the benifit of branching and such have limited impact for the scene.
However at the same time sometimes the biggest boost comes from the patch itself from what I've seen (and posted elsewhere in the forum), as some reviewers have disected the impact into DX9.0c, Patch 1.2, and then running SM2.0 v SM3.0.
With regards to Shadermark it would've been nice to see them compared to the ATIs <A HREF="http://www.guru3d.com/article/Videocards/135/14/" target="_new">like Guru did</A>, but it's not improtant to the boost, just how it relates to the performance of the competition, which was at the crux of some of the sattements made by some people.
So is your claim that SM3.0 dosn't have an(I give you at current time a small)advantage over SM2.0?
No and far from it, in fact the opposite. My claim is that what you are seeing is mostly nVidia selected examples of it's impact, and that the overall impact may be far less, and even somewhat limited, the more custom demos that are being included in other reviews the more it becomes apparaent that while it does have a boost, the impact can often be very limited. The question from me was the overall impact to the entire game/experience. Once the visual effects get boosted that may have a far more 'overall' effect than this, that's more the point.
As for the image rendering issues/quiz, many people have noticed the negative impact of the patch on ATIs, a good example is at <A HREF="http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/farcrypatch/" target="_new">DriverHeaven</A>, which mentions that the patch took ATI's IQ from spot on to terrible. The question arises, as they say, how did CryTek/UBI let that slip through?
Anywhoo, gotta go eat, hope that covers it.
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