What's the point of DirectX if the GPU designers have to re-write the graphics routines of many games and include them in so called "Drivers". Implementations vary so significantly that too much effort is required to improve the "Driver" and less effort spent on the actually hardware. I also suspect the ATI drivers to be using more CPU resources compared to Nvidia.

I'm sure they will be several rounds of "Driver" improvements from both Nvidia and ATI before the dust settles. GTX280 having large advantage in Texture processing and pixel output that shows 2x of ATI HD4850 in rare cases. In basic shader ops they may be very similar but the different designs cause the relative performance to jump all over the place.

Amazed at people raving about 12 reboots a year forced, and thinking this is a measure of quality. Both ATI and Nvidia have a long way to go. I think it is worse than it was 5 years ago.

Oh and Intel ain't anywhere better, from the business side of drivers.

A warning for SAPPHIRE ATI Radeon X1950 GT owners who run Vista 64. This driver package wouldn't even let me start up my PC. I had to use last known good configuration for it to start up. Tried uninstalling the drivers and reinstalled only to have it happen again.

DO NOT INSTALL THESE DRIVERS IF YOU OWN THIS VIDEO CARD.

My god, 10-15% boost in 3dMark!? Incredible!

nvidia users just died a little bit more inside. At least I just did. The worst thing about getting and having the 8800gtx was that Nvidia pretty much drove the truck away as soon as I was sold.

Vista 64bit is still a joke with nvidia drivers, half the features aren't even available for Vista and when they are, it's 32bit only. WTF.

The best thing about getting/having the 8800gtx is it sitll plays everything out there, at least in between the random game bug or crash caused by the graphics driver.

"Lost Planet (DX10 version): Performance increases of 1 or 2 frames per second across the ATI Radeon HD 3000 Series products and the ATI Radeon HD 2000 Series of products, resulting in as much as a 20% performance increase."

Just to make sure I'm doing the math here correctly...

1 fps = 20% increase? So they went from 5 to 6 fps? Or on the other end of it, they went from 10 to 12 fps? At the top end of increase? I pity the user who only got a 4% increase instead of the 20%...

my next gpu purchase is an amd :)

3DMark Vantage is serious business.

no mention of 4800 series drivers

I wonder what the total percentage improvements are for both the 2000's and 3000's compared to their initial releases.

It would be nice to see benchmark comparisons.

ATI drivers rock!

I would take these performance boosts with a grain of salt.

I bought a Radeon 3870 and have been noticing image quality reduction with newer patches that increase performance.

It would be nice if TR revisited image quality tests every few driver revisions. I'm pretty sure they put on their best for the initial release of the card then start doing this to pull in the wragglers after all the thorough testing is done.

excellent title for this article, cyril. :)

It's good to know there is still lotsa potential to be squeezed from HD series.