To go down the rabbit hole even further common benchmarks will run with one-off drivers to give the appearance of better performance. I've seen vendors skip me

To go down the rabbit hole even further common benchmarks will run with one-off drivers to give the appearance of better performance. I've seen vendors skip mem-zero, skew buffer sizes, overclock, disable thermal limits and all sorts of other shenanigans specifically targeted at gaming benchmarks. Only real way to evaluate hardware is to run the exact loads(or simulacrum of them that's not disclosed to the vendor) which probably overkill for consumer hardware.