I talk to a few tier 1 reviewers who do a ton of testing, one reported right after Phenom was launched games average frame rates were slower but the games ran smoother, now I don't take that much notice while testing so i just ask more reviewers to see what they feel....and they all say the same.

Now I thinks it not only CPU, I think its total platform and AMD have been working really hard on this for the past 18months. 4XXX GPU's have suddenly come good, ATI's driver dept look to be getting a move on to take the cards to new levels. I actually feel the driver writers were being held back by the 3XXX series cards and are now starting to get it together as they have more to work with.

So, AMD are just building a platform that plays games well, they dropped the need to compete in super pi etc and just concentrate where they think end users feel the system should perform.
I think it will get even better with the new GX chipset, all we need is someone to test it for us vs the older FX chipsets.