When it comes to graphics cards, the hardware itself is only a part of the performance equation as well-built software to complement that is almost equally as important. Drivers help to enable various features inside the hardware itself, reduce the overhead, among other things. Here is a glaring example of it where Intel's latest Arc driver boosts the performance of games on older APIs by close to 80%. New games like NFS Unbound also see twice the performance. Here are another couple of examples, this time from AMD where there was a hefty performance boost in DirectX 11 and in OpenGL.
Sean Pelletier, a Senior Product Manager at Nvidia, recently shared some interesting statistics regarding new driver releases. Pelletier showed how Nvidia is far ahead of AMD and Intel in terms of WHQL-certified driver releases. The numbers are for 2021 and 2022 and Nvidia says it released five times as many WHQL drivers compared to AMD in 2021. The latter can pat itself on the back though as its Green rival is only three times ahead in 2022. Meanwhile, Intel has been worse off this year.
For anyone keeping track of driver releases for gamers:#GeForce #GameReadyDrivers pic.twitter.com/yurEIWsVBH
— Sean Pelletier (@PellyNV) December 8, 2022
WHQL or Windows Hardware Quality Labs certification by Microsoft is a way to ensure that these driver packages are compatible with Windows and can be distributed via the Windows Updates.
Aside from WHQL signing, the chart also contains figures related to the number of games optimized. In this regard too, Nvidia touts it was able to release game-ready drivers for around twice as many games compared to AMD Radeon. Meanwhile, Intel seems to be doing a far better job this year, and it makes sense is Team Blue is trying to become a serious contender in the discrete GPU market now.
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