Third-party audit reveals AMD drivers are the most stable for gamers
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Luka_Aveiro
Interestingly, on my system (r3 1200, 16gb gskill aegis hynix m chips, rx 580 4gb asus, msi b350m mortar, ssd 525gb) any driver after the 18.4 makes Fortnite crash after some time playing, so...
vbetts
Moderator
True, really OpenGL on Windows at least now a days people use for emulators. I'm sure there's more uses for it, but gaming isn't one of them.
Pimpiklem
No surprise to me.
when i see people slating AMD i just laugh because they show no experience.
I have to say when the 290 cards came out i was suffering bsod a lot even on install.
But AMD needed that to stop them becoming complacent.
I fully expect Nvidia to improve after this report.
thesebastian
I don't know about AMD (last time I used its drivers was with a ATI 5850).
But Nvidia drivers are completely rubbish. In every release you might gain/lose performance/stability depending on the game/application. (The worst thing that could happen is a crash in a game or app or display driver)
And the control panel is still rubbish, you have cooldowns everywhere... it takes seconds to open, seconds to Save, seconds for almost any action. We're in 2018 and this reminds me of running an app 20 years ago.
Stormyandcold
Looks like a cherry picked test. I'm calling BS and it's no where near any indication of stability in real applications. Heck, I could easily pick just 1 game to test and make AMD look like absolute crap, then, go global with that BS news and people will believe it.
Entranc3d
It is cherry picked... because it is just so long just see this - https://community.amd.com/thread/204857
The title sums up the rest is almost other threads of problems with this drivers and cards, heck even having the monitor to "shut off" makes me need to reset the computer because it won't come back up....
alanm
Same. Virtually flawless experience with my Nvidia GPUs for years. An occasional Nvidia driver related BSOD may crop up once every few months, but thats about it.
Kaleid
Haven't had Nvidia for ages (almost all the cards back then had coil whining) but the last time I had trouble with AMD visually was with Mass Effect 2, the water was flickering. Took them about one month to fix.
And then of course there has been some stuttering in some games, which luckily the frame time measurements fixed in the end.
Remember also that Nvidia was responsible for about 40% of the OS crashes in Vista.
But people tend to ignore Nvidia problems or forget about them.
You can still hear the red bus bad driver joke about Ati/AMD. It's rare but it occurs.
alanm
All these tests show is that AMD has better driver stability than Nvidia on select hardware (with presumably 1 or 2 different drivers?) over a period of 12 days. No one can assume far reaching conclusions outside of that very limited framework.
There are no bad or good AMD /Nvidia drivers other than demonstrated in that brief slice in time the tests were conducted. For those who want to reach grand sweeping conclusions, these tests would have needed to be done 2 or 3 times a year over the last 10-15 years.
warlord
I agree. I encountered BSOD/GSOD with AMD/ATI once per 2 years. Rock stable for sure. But they are buggy. In gaming, videos, Windows User Experience. Far from perfect but working good. For sure better than Nvidia ones. Weak gpus with good software versus powerful gpus with incompetent software. I hope Intel is gonna deliver the golden ratio after decades of a boring 2-way monopoly.
RadioActiveLobster
Interesting bit left out of the story but included in the source...
Crazy Serb
This looks to me like clickbait title. It has nothing to do with games, even less for stability during gaming...
AMD should not be able to get WHQL sticker for 2 years now considering their drivers makes specific supported GPUs to run out of spec as soon as specific things get used
Margalus
AMD paid for the results, that is why they did so well. This company cherry picked drivers and tests for each card so that they could make sure that they had the best for AMD and the worst for NVidia.
I'm not saying that AMD drivers are bad, just that the results cannot be trusted to be indicative of anything.
carnivore
I've had more trouble with nVidia drivers than ATi/AMD. Now with AMD I hate only things - OpenGL drivers (emulators) and F**king inability to turn off downclocking. When I see sub 60 FPS and low clocks ingame not on loading, I want to lobotomize whoever responsible in driver team for not makeing software switch like nVidia with jackhammer 🙂
alanm
"Commissioned by AMD"
Ha ha.. well spotted. https://qaconsultants.com/stabilityaudit/
Even if the results were accurate, it says nothing other than these drivers particular performance in that space of time. Consequently the test is misleading. AMD know this and is why they commissioned the test
HWgeek
I am really thinking goin back to AMD, I had RX 470 and it was great for YouTube even on my i3 6100 and gaming (on it's price level) and few month ago upgraded to 1080TI Zotac AMP extreme and YouTube got slow on i3 , out of sync and the the cracking noises started( found out it's become common issue ) reinstalling win10 didn't help much, now I am on Ryzen 2700x and YouTube runs fine but the cracking nose comes and goes, now thinking to change to Vega64 , don't care about the performance , nVidia experience for me is horrible.
https://www.google.co.il/search?q=audio+crackling+windows+10+nvidia&oq=audio+crackling+windows+10+nvidia&aqs=chrome..69i57.7863j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
fantaskarsef
I can't say much about AMD's drivers since I haven't used one of their GPUs in quite some time, but if I think about it, my NV drivers haven't crashed in a long time, maybe once since I got my 1080Ti.
But... also part of the driver, bugged Gsync in windowed mode, bugged Gsync with more than one screen... there I can easily imagine what those tests were that NV drivers failed...
I can't say that Freesync for example works every time, windowed, more than one screen when one hasn't gotten Freesync, but for NV there is quite some work to do on their "ecosystem".
reb0rn
Sorry but I have zero trust in this review... so far its the oposite for me and work as technician ....
+ ppl with mining rigs have a lots of driver issues and ppl with NV almost none
GREGIX
No wonder. Since fury I have had single 0 problems with amd drivers. Till vega 64 was all good too. Son now has vega and he has no problems...
But I changed to 1080 and well... had some crashes. GPU driver related CTD. Mostly Vermintide2 now, but anyway...
Size_Mick
Gee, an audit paid for by AMD, which doesn't rely on testing with any actual games, shows that AMD's drivers are more stable than Nvidias? Well, color me sold!
Seriously, I haven't used any ATI/AMD cards in about 6 years, so I can't speak to the present, but the track record of AMD drivers is HORRENDOUS. Don't believe me? Try reading archived posts from the last 20 years about AMD drivers on this very site.
