FX5900 Texture draw delay?

[tecy]

My brother was playing splinter cell last week and I noticed that at a certain distance there was no or very small about of quality textures on any object in a game untill you get a certain distance from the object. I would say about 8ft away from the perspective within the game. We ran aquamark 3 benchmark and notice on the bit near the beginning where the camera moves towards the yellow spaceship that the textures where only being drawed out on the spaceship at a certain distance untill that distance is reached it looks flat and lifeless. We realy saw this in Farcry where all the trees and graphics where kind of blured over, the trees looked like blobs of plastic. Again untill you get to about 8ft near any object it remains the same then one more step forward it suddenly draws out the detail and textures?

ON my Geforce 4 ti4200 and my 9800xt cards textures and detail are there from any viewable distance and never notice the draw out.