Indeed, and it is also natural for Nvidia to find the most improvements in the newest architecture. Maxwell was quite a big change fro Kepler so it was blatantly obvious that Nvidia would find new ways of extracting increased performance. It is also normal that a company concentrates on the newest hardware first and works their back through progressive older hardware generations.
Another important factor when comparing newer games to older games is that the actual engines change, shader loads alter and compete requirements have increased. this is particularly important with regards to Nvidia's performance. Recent nvidia cards have had very well balanced geometry, tessellation, texture fill rates, ROPs and raw compute. AMD have had excess compute with impressive shader count bu with bottlenecks elsewhere in the command processor and geometry engines. Modern games have increased the amount of raw compute load, which will naturally favor GCn architecture and have an impact on older NVidia cards with less raw compute performance. That is good for AMD, and clearly in the future there will be increased compute loads so nvidia will design architectures with increased capabilities there. The point is though that since compute game loads on the GPU have changed then relative performance between generations increases.
Nvidia designs GPUs for today and the near future, so when new games come out with GPU loads in line with Nvidia future predictions then the new GPUs see a big performance increase compared to old architectures. This isn't gimping drivers at all, it just signing a GPU for the games that will exist in the GPU's lifetime.
WTF are they thinking running is with Physics on? on AMD it runs on the CPU and kills performance, on Nvidia it doesn't.
