I have to say that when I saw the list of performance improvements on the latest set of Catalyst drivers I was shocked. What was even more interesting, though, was the fact that they’re not a bunch of performance improvements that are aimed at Windows 7, but if you have a quick look at what exactly AMD are offering us it's also clear that they've helped remove an important problem that is seen on so many systems.

What we're seeing is that most gains are seen on big dual CrossFire X setups that find themselves CPU limited. Since graphics cards tend to move faster than CPUs, it's not uncommon for CPU limitations to be an issue. This is one of the main reasons we have our CPU overclocked at 3.8GHz, to give the graphics cards we test a fair and balanced scoring pattern.