Since the release of the Crysis single-player demo a little over a week ago, NVIDIA have released several ForceWare 169-based driver sets, offering improved performance in this much-anticipated title. However, when we came to utilise these drivers for our own testing here at Elite Bastards, we came across some rather interesting rendering anomalies when benchmarking the Crysis demo - In this article, we investigate further, to see just how the discovered issue affects both performance and image quality on NVIDIA's GeForce 8 series boards, as well as how to work around the issue.

"Normally, Crysis updates the reflections on the water's surface after every few frames, so that the reflections constantly show what you are actually seeing on-screen at that time. This doesn't happen after every frame as a compromise between burning up lots of GPU cycles and making the image that you see in-game look realistic, with an update every three frames or so proving to be more or less adequate in keeping the reflection in the water looking as it should.

However, the 'stretching' effect we are seeing are due to the water reflections, with any of NVIDIA's ForceWare 169.0x series of drivers in use, being updated far more infrequently - Around every ten frames or so by my calculation. This means that although your viewpoint changes, the reflections don't, thus you actually see them stretch and distort as the camera pans and changes position. Like I say, it's quite difficult to explain without seeing it in action, but believe me, it's not pretty."