From our earlier testing you might recall that GoW+3870X2+DX10 mode=extremely poor performance. This is one game we've kept an eye on, without any significant improvements until these new drivers hit the Rage3D labs.

Gears of War - 3870X2 vs. 3870X2 CF:

Gears of War - 3870X2 CF

Gears of War - 3870X2

Yummy! We've checked the DX10+AA scenario as that was the worst offender in our earlier tests; the improvements we're seeing are nothing short of amazing. What once was a slow mess has become a very playable experience. Something else is also apparent though - currently, Gears appears to be capped at 2 GPU scaling, at least through its DX10 pathway. Let's synthesize the improvements the new hotfix brings:

Gears of War - Vantage vs Official:

Vantage Hotfix vs Official

The increases are rather huge, mainly due to the very low level of performance that prior drivers induced. Capping Crossfire to 2 GPUs for the moment also cured the issue with QuadCF causing even worse performance than DualCF - we would've loved to see scaling to 4 GPUs actually, but this will to do for the time being.