So 10% in Bioshock Infinite and 11% in Metro Last Light are nothing eh?
I can appreciate sarcasm, but it's not really needed here, this is what I said:
"Outside of some SLI profiles being added and a couple specific game improvements, there's been nothing significant."
So yes, a few games showed some nice gains, but that was about it. Even those games you pointed out show very mixed results depending on which test you look at. By the way you post, you also make it seem like AMD is just sitting on their hands the whole time and never have performance increase from their drivers either, which is not true at all. Some people have reported noticeable gains in some games with the 14.6 catalyst driver which Termie did not use either.
So no, I don't find that very significant in this context as this is pretty much the status quo. Would the Nvidia cards performed a little better with the latest drivers? Sure. Would have changed much in the big picture? Not really, Termie showed the cards going back and forth depending on the game, and they'd still be doing the same with newer drivers, just with slightly different margins.
By the way, here's another example:
Apparently you merely glossed over the article in your zeal to downplay the importance of drivers.. According to the article, Crysis 3's (one of the games Termie tested) minimum and average jumped 17% and 16% respectively as a result of those drivers, which I suppose is nothing significant to you..
I didn't gloss over anything and I never once downplayed the importance of drivers. Again, re-read what I wrote, in context, and you won't see any disagreement between my links and what I wrote. Also, just to reiterate since you focused on it, that particular test was run at 720p with no AA/AF to try and emphasize any improvements the driver was claiming to make to CPU performance. In other words, when playing at resolutions that a PC gamer with that type of card are going to play at (1080p), you most likely will not see the same type of improvement. For instance, at 2560x1440 Anandtech reported zero improvement and the C2Q system only showed about ~3% gains.
You guys can downplay driver enhancements and optimizations if you want to. But there's a damn good reason why reputable hardware review sites always make sure their drivers are up to date in their reviews..
No one is downplaying driver enhancements, just being realistic about them. Yes, it's usually best practice to have up to date drivers, but that doesn't mean we just throw out what Termie has done when he has the cards himself and was willing to put in the time and effort to do this for us. I'm not going to ask someone who volunteered his time to do this to go back and retest everything from a couple of months ago when we have plenty of reviews showing what the new drivers bring. The data is good. You can see it for what it is, use a little extrapolation if you want for driver updates, and go from there. Nothing really to debate here unless you just don't like the results. If you want, buy all of the cards yourself and run the tests how you see fit.
Termie, thanks again, I won't post here again because I don't want it to derail from your thread any more than it already has. Just trying to clear the air a bit, but I'll just move on.
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