We've learned that within two to three weeks' time, ATI might have a new driver to counter Nvidia's 180 series.

Nvidia’s 180 driver ends up significantly faster than ATI’s Radeon HD 4870 in top five, Nvidia picked games; but we’ve learned that the new Catalyst should get Radeon HD 4870 back in the game.

The upsetting part is that both companies took months after the release to release a proper driver for their cards and it looks that ATI has been holding back performance just in case Nvidia comes back, or it simply took them more than three months to solve their original problems.

Either way, it is not something to be proud of, but the end users will get more performance out of their chips, eventually.