Nvidia Takes a Shot at AMD's 'Sub-Par Beta Drivers' for GPUs

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Nvidia prides itself in not making beta graphics drivers — not anymore, at least.

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Nvidia released a new video today alongside its latest 512.59 drivers, detailing how the company goes about creating its Game Ready Drivers for GeForce graphics cards. Nvidia explains the entire process of driver creation from beginning to end, noting how each driver is extensively tested to ensure a stable and high-quality product. While doing so, Nvidia wastes no time in taking a few jabs at AMD for creating "sub-par" beta drivers and prides itself on not indulging in the practice.

Nvidia starts with the functionality of a GPU driver. GPU drivers are the lifeblood of the graphics engine, allowing it to communicate directly to the OS, graphics APIs, and games themselves. Without it, the GPU would not be able to function at all.

But the process goes deeper than that, Nvidia explains, as there are two different modes drivers need to access within Windows: User mode and Kernel mode. User mode communicates directly with the game and OS, while kernel mode communicates to the GPU directly and has full access to system resources.

GPU drivers are created with this in mind, with optimizations for both modes. Nvidia explains that driver development is critical to have a smooth gaming experience. Driver optimization is crucial to ensuring system latency is low and that frame rates don't fluctuate wildly, which also helps ensure games don't crash.

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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.

37 Comments Comment from the forums
  • -Fran-
    I mean... If they barely give any actual functionality to the drivers and separate some of the actual interesting things on that garbage that GFE is, then it's not surprising.

    Using AMD, now at least, you don't really need 3rd party applications for monitoring, tweaking and configuring like nVidia does, so this is very disingenuous to state and kind of funny as it points out their lack of spine.

    As a general thing, I see as many issues with nVidia drivers as I see with AMD, while they're way way less "feature rich" than them, so...

    Regards.
    Reply
  • blppt
    Meh, AMDs drivers are light years better than they used to be. Maybe not quite to Nvidia's level, but they've made big progress.

    AMDs main problem is having to individually optimize DX11 and earlier games because they've never been able to match Nvidia's superb DX11 optimization globally.
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    Honestly having beta drivers to begin with is just asking for trouble from people who don't know any better. Especially when people are conditioned to think that the latest driver version is always the bestest version.

    blppt said:
    AMDs main problem is having to individually optimize DX11 and earlier games because they've never been able to match Nvidia's superb DX11 optimization globally.
    They could do that by implementing driver wide support for DX11 deferred contexts. But for some reason they never did.
    Reply
  • setx
    hotaru.hino said:
    Honestly having beta drivers to begin with is just asking for trouble from people who don't know any better.
    If you think that "Game Ready", "WHQL" or something drivers are better in general than "beta" – you are mistaken. Sure, they likely test it more with games that I'm never going to play but that's completely useless (to me).
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    setx said:
    If you think that "Game Ready", "WHQL" or something drivers are better in general than "beta" – you are mistaken. Sure, they likely test it more with games that I'm never going to play but that's completely useless (to me).
    WHQL is a formal qualification test from Microsoft that every driver must go through, regardless of what it's for.

    I think that makes them objectively better than beta drivers.
    Reply
  • Alvar "Miles" Udell
    I have to say that with my 15 years with AMD I did have numerous driver issues over the years which required rolling back to the previous month's release, and sometimes couldn't use newer drivers for months on end because they would introduce some game breaking or system breaking issue, I have not experienced this yet with my two years of using an nVidia card.
    Reply
  • King_V
    In 25 years, I haven't had problems with ATI/AMD drivers. The vast majority of my cards have been ATI/AMD.

    I've had only a few Nvidia cards, and I have had issues with their drivers in the past, but not a lot. One that was unsolvable, though. This one particular EVGA Nvidia card did NOT want to work on this one system that had a motherboard with an Nvidia chipset. Ironically, an ATI card worked in it just fine.

    Still, my thought is that maybe Nvidia felt the need to try and reinvigorate that dying group that insists that "Oh, AMD drivers are unreliable" because of some issue from years ago, that they might not have ever personally experienced, but only read about. Gotta get them to start making those claims again online whenever someone asks "should I choose this Nvidia card, or that AMD card?"
    Reply
  • hotaru.hino
    King_V said:
    Still, my thought is that maybe Nvidia felt the need to try and reinvigorate that dying group that insists that "Oh, AMD drivers are unreliable" because of some issue from years ago, that they might not have ever personally experienced, but only read about. Gotta get them to start making those claims again online whenever someone asks "should I choose this Nvidia card, or that AMD card?"
    I mean, AMD RTG's marketing group doesn't have their hands clean either.

    But I don't condone NVIDIA stooping to their level.
    Reply
  • magbarn
    blppt said:
    Meh, AMDs drivers are light years better than they used to be. Maybe not quite to Nvidia's level, but they've made big progress.

    AMDs main problem is having to individually optimize DX11 and earlier games because they've never been able to match Nvidia's superb DX11 optimization globally.
    It’s why I’m returning my 6700xt and keeping 3060ti. Although the 6700xt should be faster than the 3060ti, it’s significant slower in the dx11 game that I play, FFXIV. The 3060Ti able to do 4K easily at 60 fps on max settings, I have to significantly lower settings in order to keep above 60 fps.
    Reply
  • blppt
    They could do that by implementing driver wide support for DX11 deferred contexts. But for some reason they never did

    I thought they decided that their GPU architecture would not benefit from that? I remember the whole reason they spent money on Mantle was that the way they designed that current GPU made it very tough to multithread pre-DX12 APIs universally, or something along those lines.
    Reply