Long decried for the “quality” of its drivers, AMD seems to have understood the issue on this subject and regularly delivers updates to obtain significant performance gains. According to the company, in 2021, it has published 26 certified drivers (WHQL) against the 20 published by NVIDIA. But AMD does not stop there and announces to test its drivers on 6,000 PCs with different hardware configurations while NVIDIA would be satisfied with “only” 4,500 test PCs.
AMD continues to deliver optimizations with its drivers
The latest effort from the reds: AMD has completely rebuilt its graphics drivers for DirectX 11 . The result is an average performance improvement of 10%. In very specific cases, such as the very old World of Warcraft: Shadowlands, you can even expect a performance improvement of up to 30%.
AMD’s official communication on its drivers:
Our engineering teams are always looking for ways to give users better performance. In the past year alone, we’ve averaged 15% performance gains across multiple titles, and these benefits are available to our users for the life of their product. Most recently, we rebuilt our DirectX 11 driver from the ground up to deliver an average performance increase of up to 10% on your Radeon RX 6000 graphics card, with some games achieving even higher-than-average gains like Assassin’s Creed Odyssey -up to 28%-, World of Warcraft: Shadowlands -up to 30%-, and Grand Theft Auto V -up to 11%-. Says AMD on its official website. Stability of drivers : A lot of effort, thought and testing goes into the development of each driver; WHQL (Windows Hardware Quality Labs) testing method is one of the industry standards that ensures quality. WHQL is a Microsoft testing process that hardware vendors can use to validate the compatibility of their products with Windows operating systems. WHQL incorporates a test suite that vendors such as AMD run locally. Approval records can be sent to Microsoft to generate an approval certificate. Passing WHQL is only a small part of the overall testing methodology used by AMD software. Our quality control teams use a portfolio of sophisticated, non-overlapping stability tools from operating system vendors, software vendors and computer system manufacturers. The result is exceptional driver stability: 99.95% of users experience no crashes when installing AMD software. We’ll let you be the judge of that last statement.