% performance increases with each new driver

[Anarchist420]

How do they get those performance increases? Do they ever decrease image quality or do they do it some other way?

 

[imaheadcase]

It just takes them awhile to get hands on copy of game to optimize for it. I'm sure the beta drivers they had out just enabled certain features they know for sure to work, then this release they fixed some more stuff, for example maybe they did not have time to enable physics.

 

[Borealis7]

drivers hold a bunch of functions that eventually make calls to the hardware itself.
in the course of playing a game, these functions can be called millions of times (several functions for every frame). you could gain a lot just by reducing the "overhead" of each function just by a little (tweaking memory management and code operations, since it boils down to C or ASM code anything's possible) and that's without changing the algorithms themselves.

also they can make game specific optimizations by analyzing the calls made to the hardware during a game and improve the ones the game uses.

some people say that game specific optimizations is like cheating on benchmarks, that the drivers should be good for ALL games but that's impossible. to the end-users like us, its transparent as along as its working.