NVIDIA ForceWare 169.04 - Crysis demo performance and image quality

For the huge number of fans of first-person shooters around the world, the release of the single-player demo of Crysis was a time of great excitement for obvious reasons.  Graphics enthusiasts too had plenty to be excited about, with this high-profile title promising to offer unprecedented levels of graphics effects and DirectX 10 functionality.

As has been the custom in recent months, this high-profile release also brought forth a new beta driver from NVIDIA - ForceWare 169.01.  Over the past week or so, this has been supplemented by a ForceWare 169.02 WHQL release for the company's new GeForce 8800 GT part, as well as most recently a beta ForceWare 169.04 driver set for all GeForce series users.

One of the common purposes all of these driver sets served was, to quote NVIDIA's own release highlights:

"Recommended driver for Crysis single player game demo and TimeShift."

Indeed, analysis showed that this driver did, as anticipated, increase performance in the Crysis single player demo.  Of course, there's nothing unusual about that, with most newly released titles requiring at least some driver optimisation.  However, as our testing of a GeForce 8800 GT board here at Elite Bastards moved from using the unreleased ForceWare 167.26 beta we were originally supplied with to these new ForceWare 169-based releases, we noted that something was amiss with the way a certain aspect of the Crysis single-player demo was rendered.  So, here we are, to investigate and explain the issue, as well as showing how you can work around the problem to restore the correct level of image quality to your own Crysis gaming experience.  Don your best detective's hat and monocle, and let's get cracking...