ATI says that CryTek"s representative told it that what Nvidia showed us in Geneva was a 2.0/3.0 path versus 1.1 path.
The key message is that Shader model 3.0 and 2.0 look exactly the same, the ATI representative added.
In a developers" mail that we also received, it added that there is a possibility that the 3.0 path might be slightly faster in same cases on some hardware - an obvious reference to Nvidia.
ATI also claims that its hardware will run faster then Nvidia"s anyway and he added: "It"s pretty much impossible to make a sm3.0 game look noticeably different to a sm2.0 game, which is why Nvidia was comparing the 2.0/3.0 path with a 1.1 path."