Nvidia Subtly Digs AMD and Intel Over Frequency of Driver Updates

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Apparently, more is always better, at least according to Nvidia.

Nvidia driver DLSS3 games
(Image credit: Nvidia)

Nvidia's senior product manager Sean Pelletier took a jab at AMD and Intel earlier this morning on Twitter, with a spreadsheet 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 subtly criticizes Intel and AMD's lack of numerous driver updates for its GPUs, and suggests the company's driver packages are lower quality.

This is the second time Nvidia has subtly bashed its competitors over "inadequate" GPU driver updates just this year, and this appears to be a growing trend from Nvidia. In a driver development blog post earlier this year, Nvidia really prided itself in not-making beta drivers whatsoever. Making sure to note that beta drivers are "sub-par" and made with minimal testing. It's an obvious jab at AMD, who releases beta drivers liberally.

Sean Pelletier reveals 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.

In the list, Nvidia comes out on top by a staggering rate, with a total of 20 certified drivers released in 2021 and 18 in 2022. This beats out AMD and Intel's updates combined, with AMD pumping out five in 2021 and six in 2022. Intel offered up nine in 2021 and six in 2022 so far. Nvidia also has both of its competitors beat out in supported titles, with 75 supported in 2021 and 69 in 2022. AMD has "just" 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.

But to Nvidia's chagrin, AMD beats everyone by a landslide in terms of beta driver releases, featuring 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.

Nvidia isn't doing itself many favors here by equating somewhat meaningless driver release patterns to overall graphics reliability and graphical performance. Driver updates and game-ready support alone don't fully describe how performant or reliable a graphics card really is. Ray tracing aside, AMD's GPUs over the last couple generations have been quite competitive with Nvidia, despite what Nvidia claims about AMD's drivers.

Its also worth mentioning that Nvidia has also released several GPU driver hotfixes over the past year, to fix crippling bugs and glitches in its game-ready drivers. So take Nvidia's data for what you will.

Aaron Klotz
Aaron Klotz
Contributing Writer

Aaron Klotz is a contributing writer for Tom’s Hardware, covering news related to computer hardware such as CPUs, and graphics cards.

18 Comments Comment from the forums
  • punkncat
    I don't have an AMD GPU for which to form an opinion on, however, I will say that of the last (4) Nvidia drivers (2) of them were complete trash. I guess it could be said that if you can't do the drivers correctly, just do loads of revisions...
    Reply
  • TechieTwo
    It sounds like Nvidia is feeling the loss of sales from overpriced products.
    Reply
  • YouFilthyHippo
    Now let's make the same table but instead of driver updates, it's melting GPUs
    Reply
  • hotaru251
    I haven't owned a non green gpu since... 2010?

    I'd take less driver updates if it means i don't get WORSE performance randomly with these "new" drivers.


    Also AMD does em less, but they also have a LOT more improvement (i mean look at them opengl driver update a bit ago that cranked performance)
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    punkncat said:
    I don't have an AMD GPU for which to form an opinion on
    I own all (Except Intel yet). Nvidia should be proud of stability they provide(Except GT1030, that one sucks... Runs out of GPU memory and becomes a stuttery mess). But on my AMD system I normally experience graphical glitches that will only resolve with a restart (Restarting GPU driver, and a host of other tricks don't seem to reload or fix). In contrast to my GTX1080 system, Can run it for months with no issue. Nvidia continues to justify its premium until AMD or Intel can catch up.
    Reply
  • punkncat
    cyrusfox said:
    I own all (Except Intel yet). Nvidia should be proud of stability they provide(Except GT1030, that one sucks... Runs out of GPU memory and becomes a stuttery mess). But on my AMD system I normally experience graphical glitches that will only resolve with a restart (Restarting GPU driver, and a host of other tricks don't seem to reload or fix). In contrast to my GTX1080 system, Can run it for months with no issue. Nvidia continues to justify its premium until AMD or Intel can catch up.


    My last AMD GPU was a 7770 2GB model. It was a perfectly stable bit of hardware and is actually still in daily use.

    Generally speaking, I don't actively update my Nvidia drivers unless they present an issue, or when they get signed and auto-update via Windows. When they become problematic, then I actively update and as I mentioned in my post above, several of this last batch that came out gave more than a few issues.
    Reply
  • Amdlova
    I use old amd gpus all the time to test hardware, and it works all windows version with no problem. But nvidia greed on old cards don't have any problem at all with drivers, but when have an update from windows or trying to find the best driver for the right game, you can get a dead card... when I got an machine from a friend I go to Google and find the best driver to the card, because don't want do kill someone's card with a bad or evil corporation "We miss something, sorry".
    Reply
  • DataMeister
    Considering that Nvidia has released plenty of drivers with bugs, what I gather from this announcement is that Nvidia is still releasing "beta" quality drivers, but refusing to label them as such.

    Is there a standard level of testing everyone has to go through to qualify a driver as non-beta? Are AMD and Intel's beta drivers failing WHQL certification or are they just not being submitted as often?
    Reply
  • ezst036
    On Linux, Nvidia is on the bottom. When their binary driver works, it's great. But frequently there asterisks everywhere.

    Only supports some cards, doesnt support wayland very well, if you upgraded the kernel then you need to wait for the next driver, and other annoying oddities.

    I've seen people go to try Linux and they are Nvidia owners, and they run into an issue, which turns out the distro defaulted to wayland. That's very annoying, because a new user is simply going to see that "linux still doesnt work". They aren't going to bother with the device driver flame wars that some users engage in. "Back to Windows, where everything works correctly." Great. Lost another one because Nvidia is stubborn.

    Nvidia did finally release a more open driver solution, but to my knowledge it's not considered production-ready yet.
    Reply
  • cyrusfox
    punkncat said:
    My last AMD GPU was a 7770 2GB model.
    Yes the old GCN is still rock solid(I was using a 7950 for awhile). Issue is RDNA, lots of bugs still. Granted much better than even a year ago, but still not mature. For instance with my 5700XT, after game or other load, some setting screens (Windows or primocache) will be all white an no way to interact with, can't return functionality outside of rebooting. Other noticeable graphical glitches(mouse Point corruption, photo showing corruption and other horizontal line glitches). All my issues are resolved by rebooting exception issues with audio through HDMI output of the card... I gave up on that.

    Maybe there is a good case to show AMD does better with legacy GPU support than Nvidia(which you are left high and dry). From my experience though Nvidia's current cards (up to 6 years old) work as you expect without any issues.
    Reply