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Nvidia mocks Intel and AMD's GPU drivers

by on13 December 2022


Pot calling kettle black?

The GPU maker named after a Roman demon, Nvidia has snarked at the driver reliability of its new rival Intel and older rival AMD. 

Nvidia's senior product manager Sean Pelletier waved a spreadsheet in Twitter showing off how capable Nvidia's driver development team is compared to the competition.

The spreadsheet shows how many fully certified, non-beta driver updates Nvidia has published over the past two years, and how those updates feature significantly more game support compared to AMD and Intel. The Tweet slams Intel and AMD's lack of numerous driver updates for its GPUs, and suggests the company's driver packages are lower quality than Nvidia.

Nvidia has been bashing its rivals a lot over "inadequate" GPU driver updates just this year. Earlier this year Nvidia bragged it did not making beta drivers implying that they are "sub-par" and made with minimal testing. AMD releases beta drivers rather a lot. 

Pelletier revealed how many WHQL-certified driver updates all three GPU companies have produced in 2021 and 2022, as well as the number of beta drivers each company provides. The spreadsheet also takes into consideration the total amount of games supported with all driver updates combined.

Nvidia comes out on top with 20 certified drivers released in 2021 and 18 in 2022 -- more than AMD and Intel's updates combined. AMD released five in 2021 and six in 2022 while Chipzilla had nine in 2021 and six in 2022. Nvidia had 75 supported titles in 2021 and 69 in 2022. AMD had 37 supported games in 2021 and 29 in 2022. Intel comes in last on this front, with just five in 2021 and 28 in 2022.

Pelletier to get his PR coup has to downplay the beta drivers of which AMD beats everyone.  It had 24 drivers in 2021 and another 19 in 2022. Intel meanwhile had just five beta releases in 2021, but gets close to AMD's 2022 numbers with 13. Despite what Nvidia is claiming, Beta drivers are not that bad a model as they do mean that when final models are released they have had considerably more user testing.

Driver updates and game-ready support is not a factor on the worth of a graphics card. AMD's GPUs have managed to be competitive with Nvidia even if it does not have so many driver updates. Nvidia has released several GPU driver hotfixes over the past year, to fix crippling bugs and glitches in its so called game-ready drivers.

 

Last modified on 13 December 2022
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