Quad cpu's not optimized on ATI?.........yet?

That would explain why 2 4870 X2s and 3 GTX 280s perform pretty close until you slap i7 in and 3 GTX 280s destroy 2 4870 X2s. Damn, I was toying with the idea of 3 GTX 280s for some amazing theoretical performance! I suppose there wouldn't be that much of a difference if this is true and gets fixed.

Probably - the main issue is threading, not specific i7 optimization.

^^well the test was made with single cards so it really should...

interesting article, nice find

Sorry pal, I wont stop recommending dualcores until the quadcores can compete with the E5200 @ $60-80! I mean common, a CPU that costs half the amount of the cheapest decent quadcore and can overclock easily to heights that allow it to easily outperform it in most applications! Though if you have the money then go ahead! Quadcores are future proof, but an E5200 is just plain amazing for the price/performance. Also I can kill every quadcore, and perform on par with i7 with my much cheaper E8600 with a good overclock! Common, give me one thing that is more fun than a CPU stable @ 5.0 Ghz on air (barely I will admit)!

Since weve pretty much reached the pinnacle of clock speeds, or rather, every single improvement we see becomes less and less, the vast improvements will come in IPC (tho less and less as well) , and multi core/multi threading.

Its like when people went from Black and white TVs to color TVs. Alot of stations didnt have color yet, and the color sets were crappy for true color, and mixing the color in the image often caused for fuzzy results, and color exactness wasnt that close,whereas B&W sets were cheap, and the video quality was superb.

Weve seen this before when singles were king, and the newer duals were clocked lower, and didnt perform as well, and cost much more. Its up to the individual as to how often they upgrade, and their uses of their rigs. For gaming only, since its so single threaded at this time, having a dual still holds its worth

Obviously it depends on the game, the power and the overclock are moot to me and not too sure about the stability issue.

However, in regards to this issue of driver threading, it is interesting that we have not heard of it before. I mean if nvidia has had this advantage, since when have they had it and why haven't their legions of followers been proclaiming it.

I can't see nvidia not flaunting this.

Possibly they already have with Big Bang2?

the new drivers are sweet. i didnt gain in 3dmark but games like UT3, Fallout3 and Crysis it is noticeably better. i am running a dual core so it isn't as relevant but it is their best driver release in a while.

the 180.48 drivers were released the same day as the i7 was. Initially, i dont think there was a XP driver release so I am inclined to agree with ya there on the DX10 point. All their high end cards benefited from it so it was intended for card performance without the focus being specific to the i7 from what I gather from it.