Nvidia is taking another dig at AMD (and now Intel) over their GPU drivers, but it’s tough for Nvidia’s stance to hold much ground.
Nvidia is no stranger to criticizing AMD, and more recently, Intel, as the three companies duke it out for the best graphics cards. Earlier this year, Nvidia jabbed at AMD for its drivers, claiming that optional or beta drivers (which AMD frequently releases) are “sub-par” and don’t provide a “smooth user experience.”
And Nvidia is at it again, shortly before AMD is set to release its new RX 7900 XTX graphics card.
The crux of Nvidia’s argument, which you can discern from the chart above and a blog post Nvidia wrote in April, is that AMD and Intel provide far fewer certified drivers and instead rely on beta drivers in between major releases. That’s true, as Nvidia has continued to build its Game Ready Driver program over the past several years. But it doesn’t inherently mean Nvidia’s drivers are better by default.
Certification comes from WHQL, or Windows Hardware Quality Labs. In short, whenever a new driver is developed, Nvidia sends it through a rigorous test list from Microsoft to verify that it’s stable on Windows. It’s a seal of approval, but that doesn’t mean beta or optional drivers are automatically unstable.
If you track AMD’s driver history, most recent beta drivers are turned into WHQL-certified drivers a couple of weeks after being out in the wild.
