Quote Originally Posted by tajoh111 View Post

I can't believe people are dismissing driver potential here, atleast team Red fan. This card is brand spanking new architecture and it shows with the up and down performance. The current drivers are so specialized for the gtx 28x - g80 its not even funny. The very same people that were saying 5870 didn't perform that well at launch because of drivers are the same ones dismissing fermi driver potential.

The fact is fermi biggest improvements are in games that they performed poorly in prior generations in the past which shows how new the architecture is. Considering that these chips have only had 4 months for driver development, I think it unreasonable to think fermi won't pick up big driver gains in the future.

I agree with you annihilator that future driver improvements should never be part of the purchasing equation. None the less, I think its impossible for fermi not to pick up huge jumps in the future.
The question actually is how much is it that the architecture is influencing performance in those said games?

As B3D users have pointed out, Fermi might have changed how the card does setup and tri/clock, which is corroborated in its performance in HAWX (a triangle intensive game). In traditional shader/texture games, like BFBC2 and Crysis, it doesn't seem to do all that much better than previous generations - then again, with lower ROPs and same TMU's as a GTX 285, that might be why it has limited gains.

So my point is that "up and down" performance isn't indicative of drivers when the other variable, a different architecture, is in play - if Fermi improves triangle rate, then it's not drivers at play - its architecture taking advantage of a game's engine for example.

We'll need the full review of the architecture to see whats at play here, but that's probably the biggest reason there IS a performance delta that big between games