There is an effect that after the update appears to be a rendering engine fault.
it looks almost like a ramp or extruded plane from various model surfaces almost as if it's rendering a light path for a shadow.
it does disappear when you turn to the side and it seems it's random on diffrent types of objects might be a setting like shiny, or wood, or something that determines the rendering mode for the item's surface. will have to test that to know more
I've attached a picture of the effect to this post.
and it's very appearant on 2 systems with similar spec
pc1:
AMD Athlon64 3000+
1024mb Ram
ATI Radeon 9600XT-VIO 256mb AGP
Windows 64bit professional
Ati Catalyst 5.10 64bit with catalyst control center
pc2:
AMD Athlon64 3000+
1024mb Ram
Nvidia FX6600 256mb AGP
Windows XP Home edition sp2
Tried both 78.xx and current 81.50 Nvidia driver versions with same result.