I've been a Slackware user for sometime and recently (within the last year) moved to Gentoo. Distro is probably insignificant here, the problem I have I think is related to color bit depth. I recently upgraded to an Nvidia 8800GTX and the default color gradient on the Xfce desktop shows up in bars, like there aren't enough colors for it to smoothly render the gradient. The same is true in the "atlantis" screensaver, however the system reports 24 bit color and hardware acceleration is functioning. I have an older thinkpad with an ATI 9600 and I'm using the fglrx driver there and the gradients display properly.

I did not have this problem with previous Nvidia cards. I'm using the 173.14.09 nvidia driver from portage. The card is functioning properly because sauerbraten and nexuiz run with max settings easily and glxinfo | grep direct reports that direct rendering is enabled. Has anyone else run into this issue with the 8 series cards?

I'm currently running an 8800GT in my main system and have not seen any problems. I am, however, running a slightly older driver. Off the top of my head, I don't remember specifically which one but it's a couple releases back.