NVIDIA ForceWare 169.09 - Crysis rendering follow-up

A couple of weeks ago, we stumbled across a rather intriguing issue in the then recently released Crysis single player demo with NVIDIA's ForceWare 169 series of drivers - With each driver set we tested, be they WHQL or beta, water reflections in-game were being rendered incorrectly, an issue which could be resolved by renaming the game executable to something other than 'Crysis.exe'.  However, doing this also saw performance drop somewhat, with an average reduction in frame rate of around 7% after renaming the executable.

Needless to say, our publication of these issues caused a fair amount of controversy, with some sides blowing our findings out of all proportion in order to attack NVIDIA, while others instead focused on attacking our own findings or impartiality.  Either way, the facts were straightforward enough - There was a rendering issue apparent in these drivers which was affecting image quality.

Fast forward to two weeks later, and Crysis has now been released as a full retail game - With it, NVIDIA has also released an updated beta set of ForceWare drivers - ForceWare 169.09, which (aside from SLI support for the game) also claims to fix this water rendering issue.  Given the interest in our initial discovery of this issue, it seems only fair and relevant to follow up the story with the release of these new drivers, to ensure that the issue in question is indeed fixed, as well as investigating how this change (if at all) affects performance.  So, read on while we give this new driver set the once-over.