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nvidia cards don't seem to be able to take use of the extra 64 megs of RAM, but many ATI benchmarks show some signifacant improvements. Now I don't know if its a hardware design thing, or just inefficient drivers, but I'm leaning to the drivers side.
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I'm strongly leaning towards the hardware side rather then driver inefficiencies, doubtless drivers play into it also but I'm of the opinion that the main reason is hardware design.
It seems to stands to reason the R8500 would stand to benefit more from extra DRAM then would the GF3, it has the same pixel and vertex shader count as the GF4, a significantly more memory dependent method of FSAA, and texture compression has been shown to be less efficient in the R200's memory architecture hence it's logical the R8500 would likely stand to see a greater benefit then either the GF3 core from going from
64 > 128MB DRAM. >>
despite the extra memory performance tho, the 8500 is still beaten like it stole something by the gf4's FSAA....