Quote Originally Posted by LightSpeed View Post
But the current drivers are not introductory drivers. Fermi already received a performance boost with the latest drivers.
Yes, the current drivers are no longer introductory and have Fermi specific optimizations. But it's only been a few months since the release of Fermi, and they've already gotten large performance increases.

It usually takes a year or more to really milk the architecture for all it's worth, so more performance increases are certainly coming.

Also, why are you ignoring the fact the cayman is a new architecture as well, that can be tweaked for more performance with newer drivers too
I wouldn't say I was ignoring it. It's just that even though Cayman is a new architecture, it will still share very many similarities to it's predecessors.

Since they migrated towards a unified shader architecture, ATI's strategy has been to simply double all the resources on new designs. I think the only thing that ATI didn't double with the R800 was the memory interface, which remained at 256 bit.

And since Cayman won't be getting a die shrink, it seems like it will be a more refined version of the R800, rather than a next generation architecture.

Anyway, driver optimization is an ongoing affair with no end in sight. Cayman will undoubtedly receive performance improvements via driver tweaks, but I doubt it will get as much as Fermi, since Fermi was a completely new design.