AMD’s drivers most stable according to report

Today’s graphics card drivers are sometimes said to be as complex as entire operating systems, with giants AMD and Nvidia investing considerable resources in the field. Whether one is better than the other is often the subject of discussion, but it is not entirely easy to determine as many factors come into play.

In a study conducted by the company QA Consultants, however, it turns out that AMD may have the upper hand, as the red team on average passed a larger proportion of the tests. QA Consultants works with quality testing of software, including assignments from the US and Canadian governments.

Six machines with graphics hardware from each company were included in the tests, for a total of twelve computers. The machines are identical in addition to graphics hardware and drivers, where Windows 10 April 2018 Update was paired with the motherboard MSI Z370-A Pro, an Intel Core i5-8400, 16 GB primary memory and a SSD drive of 250 GB.

In terms of graphics cards, computing cards were mixed with their consumer-oriented ditons, which included the Geforce GTX 1080 and Radeon RX Vega 64. The systems are then run in Microsoft’s test suite CRASH, which includes graphical tests in the DirectX 9, 10 and 11 graphics interfaces with varying resolution, screen rotation, and color settings.

A test takes four hours, and the computers ran these simultaneously without interruption six times daily for a total of twelve days. The result was 432 tests started, of which AMD passed 401 and Nvidia 356, which corresponds to approved in 93 and 82 percent of the cases, respectively.

The result leads QA Consultants to the conclusion that AMD has the most stable drivers. It is worth mentioning, however, that this applies to a specific test case, and that it can differ significantly compared to actual use or other types of tests. The report as such has been commissioned by AMD.