I think this was with Wine, sorry. Matt had been working with CS:S long before Valve ever announced any Linux plans. Still, the change should help regardless!
Indeed, in WINE. Although, I really would like to have native ports of Counter-Strike: Source and Day of Defeat: Source. I've been playing both in WINE on Sandy Bridge and getting pretty good performance.
Valve said they had handed Intel the Source Engine source code, so this performance gain must be about the native Linux version of CS:S.
Yup, because the person actually responsible for the change, telling you it was for Wine, right above your post, must be wrong. After all, this is The Internet.
You know, he's the guy that did the Ivy Bridge bring-up...
I don't follow what you're suggesting here. You cropped out the part of my comment which states the i5 2500k is not Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge does support OpenGL 4.0, Sandy Bridge does not.