Earlier this morning, Nvidia’s senior product manager Sean Pelletier poked fun at AMD and Intel on Twitter with a chart demonstrating how competent Nvidia’s driver development staff is in comparison to the opposition. The spreadsheet displays the number of thoroughly tested, non-beta driver updates that Nvidia has released over the last two years, as well as how those upgrades have substantially greater game support than AMD and Intel’s equivalents. The tweet implicitly criticizes Intel and AMD for not regularly updating their GPU drivers and implies that their driver packages are of poorer quality.
Just this year, Nvidia has criticised its rivals twice discreetly for releasing “inadequate” GPU driver upgrades, and this pattern seems to be continuing. Nvidia took great satisfaction in not producing any beta drivers, as stated in a blog post about driver development published earlier this year. pointing out that beta drivers are “poor” and produced with little testing. It’s a clear dig at AMD, which frequently distributes beta drivers.
Sean Pelletier divulges the quantity of WHQL-certified driver upgrades and beta drivers that each of the three GPU manufacturers released in 2021 and 2022. The spreadsheet also accounts for the overall number of games supported by all driver upgrades.
Nvidia tops the list by a startling margin, releasing a total of 20 approved drivers in 2021 and 18 in 2022. This is superior to AMD and Intel’s combined improvements, since AMD will release five in 2021 and six in 2022. So far, Intel has provided nine in 2021 and six in 2022. In terms of supported titles, Nvidia has both of its rivals beat, with 75 supported in 2021 and 69 in 2022. A mere 37 games will be supported by AMD in 2021 and 29 in 2022. With only five in 2021 and 28 in 2022, Intel comes in last on this front.
Unfortunately for Nvidia, AMD outperforms everyone in terms of beta driver releases, releasing 24 in 2021 and another 19 in 2022. In contrast, Intel had just five beta releases in 2021, but with 13 in 2022, it nearly matches AMD’s figures.
By associating rather irrelevant driver release cycles to overall graphics dependability and graphical performance, Nvidia isn’t doing itself any favors in this situation. The performance and dependability of a graphics card cannot be properly described by driver updates and game-ready support alone. Despite what Nvidia asserts about AMD’s drivers, AMD’s GPUs have been pretty competitive with Nvidia over the past couple of generations, ray tracing apart.
It’s also important to note that over the last year, Nvidia has also issued a number of GPU driver hotfixes to address catastrophic issues and kinks in its game-ready drivers. Take the Nvidia data for what it is worth.
