6 month old benchmarks even if accurate then aren't the best indicator as the 5970 hasn't increased performance wise from driver updates significantly since whereas the GTX480 has seen ~15% performance increases in many games/applications since then.
GTX580 even at 750MHz would give a comparable gaming experience overall due to being slightly more consistant fps wise.
Whoops, so you just glossed over two major things, firstly you said the review wasn't biased, now you're ignoring it, given in, think its unfair, can't tell.
Also I specifically pointed out, show me a game result where with newer drivers the 480gtx has improved 15%, infact, show me, how many results are there in total, show me 4 games where the 480gtx got a noticeable boost.
For the record, compare them both, the majority of games have had a 1-2fps boost on both the 5970 AND the 480GTX.
Thats rather why I've already pointed that out, the "big performance boosting drivers" tend to for BOTH sides be fixing an oddity, rather than bringin up total performance. LIke if you have 14 screens, and sit facing east, and use 32xaa getting a performance of 4fps average, then new driver XXX.XX gives you a 7% speed boost....... WOOO.
In reality, drivers are pretty solid at the moment, and performance boost drivers are usually in a very small limited number of games and very limited situations.
Thats why you almost always see, game X
up to 5% performance. Not Game X, 7% faster across the board.
https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_1010_release_notes.pdf
For the record, those are very similar results to many of the "driver speed improvements" the 256 drivers bought for Nvidia users, and probably applied in just as few outlying situations and weird combinations. IE they both got a 9% boost in Uniengine according to release notes, oh wait 256 drivers were in June, those performance updates are still happening in the lastest AMD drivers. So Nvidia have one major performance driver you mention, months ago, AMD have the same improvements listed, ermm, well officially last month now, but AMD haven't had any performance improvements in way longer than Nvidia? Really?
Also look at Nvidia's list of settings in his bar charts of driver improvements in 256, in games you would use some aa and well, is there a game you wouldn't use AF, they are often running decent res but no eye candy, other times they are running 2560x1600 with 8-32xaa/16xaf. In other words, their best speed improvements(just like AMD) come often at settings you just won't use(or most of us won't).
1920x1200 and 2-8xaa I would call pretty standard options for a top end gpu, IE theres not many games that can't use some level of AA(if any), and the massive majority of us don't game at 2560x1600 full stop, those who do are likely not using 8-32xaa purely because most games would run like a pile of crap.
Havent' we also recently had this debate in many threads, where you post site X as proof and I go look and see they've used the latest Nvidia drivers, with the worst possible AMD drivers, and then it turns out they lied and they just ripped AMD results for 6 months ago and used the lastest drivers on Nvidia gpu's to expand the differences, oh yeah, we have done that.
