tabb... "we have no reference image"
do you even know what your talking about?
...see the toms review, here's a bit.
The "Massive Overdraw" test in AquaMark 3 aims to test the limits of a graphics card's fillrate. In the explosion pictured below, numerous layers of textures are added onto one another (Particle Effect) and then slowly faded out. It seems that ATi's driver doesn't continue to fade out the textures until the blending ends, instead simply cutting out certain textures when a certain degree of fade-out is reached. This obviously saves memory bandwidth, leading to a higher framerate. In the direct comparison with the image rendered by NVIDIA's FX 5950 Ultra, the result is a darker and less detailed explosion (Frame 5100).
and
The density of the smoke or refuse that is shown spewing from the pipe in this picture is much lower on the Radeon 9800 XT than on the FX 5950 Ultra. The vehicle at the left-hand edge of the screen proves that this is not the result of some difference in lighting or gamma settings.
http://www6.tomshardware.com/graphic/20031023/nvidia-nv38-nv36-20.html
see anand videocard round up's part 1 and 2 for homeworld 2 crashes
see link above for firing s. slow 2d...
i think the point has gotten lost, ati cards have there fair share of issues right now, some much more of a issue than nvidia's. however many people are focused on how bad nvidia is at dx9, when its just doesn't look that bad when you look at ati's issues, even on the dx9 aqua at tom's, ok, you don't like him, so therefore he is posting pictures and print falsely, i don't think so, nor firing s. at least they point out issues from all chips unlike some who don't (not to say of course these sites always do or don't).
if ati ran all textures, would it still be slighty faster? i thought this was a nvidia issue? whoops, guess that's a ati problem for now after all.