Sorry for digging up such an old post. Unfortunately, the 7300GT is complaining when playing FEAR. I can only put all Medium quality and turned off some shadow stuff before I can make it work in decent 60 FPS. Other than that it's fine for other games - I turned off the Anistropic and AA in games and used the nVidia settings instead - nice graphics with good framerates.
Yes - it's quite weak in Shader scenes - places that uses 'em in HL2:Episode One will pull my max FPS back into just 30. When disabling it, it'll jump back into max FPS 70. But I don't know why all the models become weird when I got this feature disabled in HL2...