On Twitter, Nvidia took a jab at AMD and Intel. In a spreadsheet, it showed how capable its driver development team is and how many fully certified, non-beta driver updates it has published. The document shows that Nvidia’s updates support more games and have more certifications–basically, they’re better quality–compared to AMD and Intel’s drivers over the past two years.
Nvidia has repeatedly bashed its competitors over “inadequate” GPU driver updates despite making frequent changes to its own. In a recent blog by Nvidia’s driver team, they were quick to mention how they make beta drivers with minimal testing and remarking that AMD drivers are of sub-par quality.
In the article “WHQL-certified GPU driver update data for 2021/2022”, Sean Pelletier reveals how many WHQL-certified updates each GPU company has produced in 2021 and 2022, as well as the number of beta drivers each company provides. The spreadsheet also takes into account the total number of games supported with all driver updates combined.
Out of the three companies compared, Nvidia comes out on top by a huge margin. The company released 40 drivers in 2021 and has 18 more scheduled for 2022, which is double the number from their two competitors combined in those same two years. Intel offers nine drivers in 2021 and six drivers in 2022, and AMD released five drivers in 2021 and six drivers in 2022. Nvidia also has more supported games than both of its competitors: 80 supported games for 2021 and 69 for 2022. Intel is second with 39 games for 2021 and 28 games for 2022, and AMD comes last with 37 games for 2021 and 29 games for 2022.
Nvidia faces stiff competition from AMD in the beta driver release category. AMD released 24 drivers in 2021 and another 19 the following year, whereas Intel had only five 2020 releases and was still shy of AMD’s 2022 numbers with 13.
Nvidia’s recent article about graphics card driver updates is a poor justification for AMD’s lack of ray tracing technology. In fact, Nvidia’s graphics cards over the last couple gaming generations have not been as reliable or performant as they should be, when compared to what AMD has offered. It would explain Nvidia’s constant touting of AMD’s inadequacies in their drivers and support.
It’s also worth mentioning that Nvidia has released several game-ready drivers over the past year to fix recently-discovered bugs and glitches that cause crashes. So take Nvidia’s data for what you will.
