No matter how you approached it the initial 3Dmark03 results told us precisely what has been discovered today. Namely that the FX series was strongest in GT1 which was the largely DX7 style rendering, it could have been stronger there because the FX does multi-texturing two pass stuff well and that was one of nVidia's complaints - namely that the test was only a single texture one for the most part.
As you increase the level of shader useage the FX's performance dropped off. When you got to GT4 the 5800 displayed performance equivalent to a 9500 (which was ATi's medium performance card of the time.). That was reflected in the scoring with the 5800 Ultra getting around 2600 3Dmarks and the 9700 Pro scoring around 4300. Wanna guess what a 9500 scored? About 2300 as I recall.
Remember it was the rectification of this quite large performance gap along with the noticeable image quality drop in 3Dmark03 that kicked a lot of the investigation off into precisely what drivers are doing. We have had a pretty clear indication with 3Dmark03, code creatures, Shadermark and the like all telling the same story - shader performance was lacklustre in the extreme on the NV3x series.