AMD suprassed NVIDIA in drivers last couple years?

I have visited Guru3d almost religiously every day now for a few years.
Among the articles, you always have a link to the latest beta drivers available for both Nvidia and AMD.

Several years ago (if anyone else remembers this) Nvidia basically self committed to a rough 1 driver release/month schedule.
At one time the SLI vs Crossfire debate with what drivers offered in terms or RL support was hugely dominated by Nvidia.
The frequency of driver updates along with solid hardware saw a huge increase in their share of the market at the time.

But...

Over the last couple years this 1 release/month schedule seems to have gone out the window, with AMD releasing many more than Nvidia. Also now the hardware from AMD is on at least equal footing, if not arguably better.

Given the 2 being so close in terms of hardware, and Nvidia only releasing drivers say half as often as AMD...

Granted that both companies will spend more resources in developing new hardware to sell to the customer rather than improving the old one via drivers, but to me it seems to be getting very evident in Nvidias case.

Do any other loyal 10 year + Nvidia users have the same feeling of "maybe its time to switch to the dark side" due to the amount of resources AMD is allocating to improving its product via drivers rather than just selling us a new one for more profit, or is it just me?

 

I left the Nvidia 4 years ago ( even though I was faithful to her since its inception) and have never regretted. For me, AMD drivers are better. AMD cards still accelerate, come with significant innovations - Mantle, True Audio, FreeSync. New NVidia cards do not offer anything new and have a similar performance to the previous generation (I do not care for reduced energy consumption). Really I do not regret that I have changed the camp

 

nvidia drivers seem to have gotten worse the last few months. Amd is def catching up and or even. With the exception on dx9 xfire. Dx11 xfire is about even with sli.

 

no to all

 

Read some of the posts in the various driver threads here. That should give you an idea where they're at.

 

Could have sworn I've seen a couple of people claiming how they wanted to "jump ship" from AMD because NVIDIA was raining drivers. Not sure how true that really was though, or if it was just some random troll response.

I'm not a long-standing NVIDIA user really, but I do like the effort AMD puts towards the open-source Linux driver if anything. Just to give a general idea of how the situation of the open-source graphics drivers are on Linux; Intel is on-top with patches and features, AMD comes in second but still pretty good support for old and new hardware, and NVIDIA is pretty bad.

To give an idea, the Nouveau open-source driver is just now getting the ability to have the GPU change clock speeds depending on load. NVIDIA has also been notoriously known for little contributions towards the project, but are getting better lately. But most of the Nouveau project currently is reversed-engineered work.

That's just the open-source driver though. On the flip side, NVIDIA has the best proprietary driver support (although it's mentioned a good bit that NVIDIA doesn't employ strict behavior with rendering). AMD's is a mix depending on the hardware and what you do (although based on my experience, I have very little issue with the drivers; same case with the Windows driver). And Intel doesn't do a separate proprietary driver; which is pretty decent (so all the work they do goes into one driver, the open one).

 

Smell the roses

Its just you. Talk about crazy talk. Time to smell the roses. Wow.

 

The reasons I switched from Nvidia to AMD.

1. It was something new to try out.

2. Had minor issues with Nvidia's drivers crashing and recovering.

3. In the price range that I had it was either a r9 290 or a 4gb 770.

Though I have nothing against Nvidia they have been good to me over the years.

 

Personal experience

I haven't had good luck with an Amd product since the X800 AIW days. That must date me but I have had both nvidia and Amd gpu tech side by side and from my personal experience AMD drivers have been nothing but a headache. The only good thing I have to say is that I have always thought ATI graphics looked superior in clarity and how crisp it all looked. Though for last few years their drivers have really been abysmal. Sorry.

 

I'm a former Nvidia user who didn't suffer from bad drivers (except for despising PhysX for being cheap) but then again my current HD6970 is four years old.

 

In our environment, spread across multiple generations of AMD cards, they haven't released a single stable driver this entire year. Black screens, blue screens and wake from sleep bugs with no hope of them ever being solved.

You might get the wrong impression looking at the forum threads, AMD has released bugger all quantity of drivers this year. Only a couple of WHQL ones and a handful of public betas. Half the driver release volume you see in here is from hacked INF files to enable the use of releases for APUs and whatnot.

If you're on NVIDIA right now, don't switch. We're about to spend way too much money going the opposite way, AMD-> NVIDIA. Ten years history here, this year has been absolutely shocking.

 

hardly


Nvidia driver support is faster and quicker to response to gamers complaints

 

AMD keeps forgetting (not taking care of) previous generation cards in their new drivers, I hate that.

Its almost like AMD forces one to keep their GPU's upto date along side their drivers, else one falls behind.

Note: Also the AMD driver installers suck big time, they don't work properly sometimes.. I gotta trouble shoot stuff manually to get things working, which gets repetitive and boring sometimes.

 

AMD releases around 40% - 50% laptop graphics out of its GPU sales?

Let me add that AMD has only now started to develop "switchable integrated" drivers since the 13.11 betas.

And only now after 14.4 are they getting somewhere with what they are trying to solve.

This is for devices that start for the Mobility 5xxx /6xxxm / etc.

These devices are more than 3 years old by now.

 

So you think the "1 driver a month" has been good, and even better when they release drivers more often? I thought the "1 driver a month" thing, was for WHQL drivers, and not random beta's, but i guess i totally misunderstood that.

The latest WHQL is 14.4 (for GPU drivers), and its from 25 april. Thats not really good... Almost 5 months with no WHQL for GPU.

The latest 14.4 gives me some random BSOD's, so im currently back at 13.12 which was released back in dec 2013

I switched to AMD from nVidia due to some driver **** they had that gave me some problems, "Driver recovered..." or some crap all the time, but it has been a while since i did that tho.

C

 

There is a perfectly fine 14.8 WHQL if you look at the top of this driver forum.

 

And you keep thinking your problems with pc are driver related, totally not hardware related, am i right?

 

That is not perfectly fine. If it was perfectly fine, it would be up for all on AMD's site for all their GPU's. It gives me issues in tri-fire btw.

 

I don't think either surpass each other tbh, as both have their ups and downs, always been equal imo.

 

Yup both have problems, both have advantages.