the 4xxx series and all ati are long to me maxed out at a driver level, since at best the games uses 1/5*1,5 of the number of the sp on board... the ati are heavy recompiler dependent , because they have an high number of heavily specialized unit, so it'up to the compiler to find and exploit the resources, all at runtime, so it can't be heavy on the cpu.. but we will see improvements at each release because even if the performance increase on the 58xx are more substantial due to di architecture(cache, distribution etc etc) they have the same basic compiler...