After not playing for a while I updated the drivers for my nvidia 8800GTS. I also applied the latest patch at the same time. After I did this I noticed two things.
At a distant zoom ships are clumping together so that one bomber icon could be a single bomber or it could be twenty bombers. I need to zoom in to the noise hair level to be sure I know what the threat is. I also noticed that the graphics for the tractor beams are really aliased and full of artifacts. Is this the patch doing this or did I somehow change something when I updated the driver?