Not only the driver, but the new tests used savegames instead of built in benchmarks, it also used several new CPU heavy games.
Yes that's true. What
@Abwx was getting at, was that even in the games included in both, AMD results were significantly worse than before. Even when they used saved games instead of time-demos, it's still a bit odd, Considering how beefy the 2700X is on resources. I've yet to see it tank so much, relatively to the competition, in actual gameplay vs time demos. One would expect the difference to be about the same give-or-take a little.
Case in point: Performance diff 8700K vs 2700X
New Article (1080 Ti results only @ 1080p):
Assassins Creed Origins - Intel: 92.6 FPS, AMD: 77.7 FPS, Diff: 19%
Project Cars 2 - Intel: 116.6 FPS, AMD: 81.5 FPS,
Diff: 43%
Kingdom Come Deliverance - Intel: 79.4 FPS, AMD: 64.7 FPS, Diff: 23%
Total War Warhammer - Intel: 62.8 FPS, AMD: 49.1 FPS, Diff: 28%
Old Review (Asus GeForce GTX 1080 Ti Strix @ 1080p):
Assassins Creed Origins - Intel: 98.5 FPS, AMD: 89.6 FPS, Diff: 10%
Project Cars 2 - Intel: 107.2 FPS, AMD: 93.6 FPS, Diff: 15%
Kingdom Come Deliverance - Intel: 78.9 FPS, AMD: 71.0 FPS, Diff: 11%
Total War Warhammer - Intel: 54.7 FPS, AMD: 49.2 FPS, Diff: 11%
AMD has
lost ~10FPS in 3/4 games while Intel has
gained 10 FPS in 2 out of 4 games, stayed even in one and lost 6 FPS in only in one title.
I don't doubt that these are the results they got, but IMO
such profound performance loss on one side, agains a similar net-gain on the other vendor, at least merits a deeper look as to why. Bear in mind the GPU, resolution and games are the same. The only difference is saved-games and drivers.
The most obvious things to test would be:
1) to run the old time-demos on the new rigs (and drivers), to see if there is a difference
2) run the same save-games with old drivers, to see if there is a difference