Quote Originally Posted by Coldon View Post
yeh, but later releases of the nvidia drivers will also offer nice performance boosts. If you really want to be fair you should compare the gtx480 with the 5870 using the launch ATI drivers, but that will never happen so just remember if the difference is 8~10% now with 10.3 drivers and NV beta drivers, given 4 months the gap will probably be more like 15%~20% with mature nv drivers.

the 10.3 drivers offer a substantial performance increase over the launch 9.12s, and the same can be expected over in NV land.
new gpus are always benched with release drivers against older cards that have matured drivers. that's not unfair at all. comparisons like that can only be done at a point in time. what you can expect from these comparisons are results that are only valid for this specific point in time as well. nobody can predict how the performance will evolve in the future. sometimes matured drivers increase performance by a significant amount, but then there are times where matured drivers don't deliver better performance at all.

but that doesn't really matter, as you buy the graphics card a this point in time as well, so the comparison is valid. when you want to buy such a card, you care about its current performance most, and not what the performance will look like in 5 months (where the performance of the competing product might be better as well...).

so, yeah, it's pretty hard to say