Uh, you hit the nail on the head, drove it home, and then forgot.
What happened to OpenGL? No performance gains to be had? If they have enabeld an extra funtion, then gains across 3dmarks would be VERY obvious, and would correlate with one another, as the instruction directly translates to the number of rendered triangles/pixels/whatever....so, if you get 30% performance in video, then video performance increases 30%... ACROSS THE BOARD. 600 points in 3dmark06 DOES NOT =1000points in 03...more like 300-400 points in 06 = 1000 points.
Most performance is gained by driver optmization for specific applications...less cpu overhead, etc, which in real-word performance translates into very little. Sure, SYNTHETIC benchmarks show the gains, but they are designed to stress certain parts of a system, not full system, so it's easy to optimize a driver for such. There's no "extra functionality" enabled...merely "functionality fixed".
This card is DX10 card, not DX9, so the way you approach how graphics are rendered onscreen plays important role...and drivers are far more important, as teh driver must properly fill the gpu with data so as to use it most effectively. It's very obvious that in previous verions there are driver issues...the simple "change desktop res for good scores in 3DMark03" speaks volumes of how badly optimized the nV drivers have been lately.
The gains seen here do not speak of extra functionality, just a better driver, with bwetter profiles for specific apps, and not "across the board" gains touted by some.
