News Nvidia Subtly Digs AMD and Intel Over Frequency of Driver Updates

[Admin]

Nvidia's Sean Pelletier shared a Tweet demonstrating how much more capable its driver development team is compared to the competition.

Nvidia Subtly Digs AMD and Intel Over Frequency of Driver Updates : Read more

 

[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...

 

[TechieTwo]

It sounds like Nvidia is feeling the loss of sales from overpriced products.

 

[YouFilthyHippo]

Now let's make the same table but instead of driver updates, it's melting GPUs

 

[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)

 

[cyrusfox]

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.

 

[punkncat]

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.

 

[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".

 

[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?

 

[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.

 

[cyrusfox]

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.

 

[Deleted member 2928070]

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.

You clearly have a defective GPU. I have a 5700 XT and I've never experienced anything like what you're saying, and I overclock/undervolt as well.

EDIT: from what you say the VRAM might not be doing good. Ever checked if cooling is fine?

 

[ravewulf]

Tbh I actually get annoyed at how frequently Nvidia puts out driver updates. I shouldn't need to be bothered by their update prompts more than once a month, tops

 

[Deleted member 14196]

That’s a big reason to stop upgrading drivers if you are not having issues

 

[tamalero]

So.. they are bragging they have a bigger team and priority from Microsoft to get the drivers WHQL approved? or I'm missing something?

 

[spongiemaster]

That’s a big reason to stop upgrading drivers if you are not having issues

The reason Nvidia releases drivers so often is to optimize for new games. If you play any games optimized in the new driver release, you should be upgrading.

 

[watzupken]

I feel this is where Nvidia failed to realize that quality is more meaningful than quantity. I own GPUs from both Nvidia and AMD, but never will I recommend updating drivers as soon as they are out. These games optimized drivers are meaningful only if (1) you play the games, and, (2) delivers much better performance.

 

[cyrusfox]

You clearly have a defective GPU. I have a 5700 XT and I've never experienced anything like what you're saying, and I overclock/undervolt as well.

EDIT: from what you say the VRAM might not be doing good. Ever checked if cooling is fine?

I run it stock, it never gets above 60°C, majority of time the fans don't even spin up. You recommend any test to check vram health for corruption? It has never blue screened on me, just after doing anything intensive it has issues doing normal windows stuff, or sometimes I do get graphical glitches on images (Which made me think my images got corrupted, nope just GPU reboot and all is back to normal)

 

[-Fran-]

Now let's make the same table but instead of driver updates, it's melting GPUs

This is the very first thing that came to mind, LOL.

AMD is definitely not perfect by any accounts, but at least they self-aware enough to tag them as "beta" drivers and act on them as such. Plus, the WHQL "stamp" is so stupid and meaningless... That's just money for Microsoft.

Regards.