With all the people bashing
imtim83 for various things, how is everybody letting one of the worst claims made here go unchallenged? The idea that "percentages are misleading" is nonsense.
Percents do not show everything. It may seem to crush it with the percent numbers but the true fp numbers may not look like that.
% improvements can be awfully misleading. 30FPS is 150% of 20FPS, but is only a 10FPS improvement... not incredible. 30FPS is a full 200% of 15FPS, but still not incredible.
Push the frame rates down far enough, and even significant % gains can be had without a huge boost in frame rate.
If the standard card (say, the GF4 Ti4600) makes 20fps on a particular game, that game demands an awful lot of the system. For another card (say, the Radeon 9700) to make 30fps on that game, for a 50% improvement, is a big deal. Yes, it's "only 10fps", but
that, the absolute frame-rate improvement, is what doesn't tell the story. If the standard were 300fps (as the GF4 Ti4600 can easily reach on older, less complex games), a 10fps improvement would be meaningless, and a 30fps improvement would be no big deal. A quick way to show how little a deal it would be is to note that it would only be
10% better.
And if there were some amazingly demanding game on which the GF4 Ti4600 made only 2fps, while the Radeon 9700 made 12fps for that "same" 10fps improvement, we should be astounded at the 500% increase, not belittling the achievement because the number still looks low. Absolute numbers are meaningless detached from the context of what's possible to achieve.
edit: Maybe this was unnecessary to post as most of the people here knew that and considered it too obvious to bother arguing.