It would not be the first time. I *bleep*ing hate Nvidia for exactly that fact. They would rather put a damper on the performance overall when it means the performance of their own hardware looks that much better. Don't get me wrong, they make some good GPU's sometimes, but they are absolutely in the business of doing it dirty. When I pay 500 dollars for a GPU, I expect top of the line Image Quality.

Also, this is what THIS article is actually about, Nvidia cheating...
2010
"If you look at it as a whole, Nvidia is doing two things, first of all doing a different workload than the rest of the world and claiming it is the same, and second not following the Futuremark rules. This is nothing less than blatant dishonesty."

2003
"Futuremark said in the statement. "We have now established that Nvidia's Detonator FX drivers contain certain detection mechanisms that cause an artificially high score when using 3DMark 03," the statement read.

Futuremark has released the version 330 patch for 3DMark 03, which prevents the Nvidia drivers from identifying the benchmark. By Futuremark's measure, the performance of the Nvidia GeForce FX 5900 Ultra drops 24 percent with the patch, compared with a drop of less than 2 percent with ATI's Radeon 9800 Pro with the latest ATI drivers."

If you know what you're looking for, there was a period in time where Nvidia's top of the line cards didn't even render proper Anisostropic Filtering AT ALL. You may not see the difference, but that doesn't make it any less dishonest because the people that are paying the money do see it and understand the difference.

God I hate Nvidia...