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  • hansmuff - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    NV is on top of their game still. One can say what they want about per-game drivers and such, but NV is on it and AMD is lagging like hell. I think this is a department where AMD could significantly make gains in the enthusiast community without new hardware. If they managed to get rid of their bad image around software, and the newest re-skin of the CC does not do that btw, I think they could do a lot better.
  • showb1z - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Ehm, AMD released a "game ready driver" for Syndicate and Battlefront 3 days ago. How is that "lagging like hell".
    In a vast majority of games these drivers are more PR than anything anyway. The real performance gains happen by dev patches and in later drivers.
  • Morawka - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Nvidia's are WHQL Certified, making driver install streamlined and secure. Almost all AMD Game Ready drivers receive the BETA tag because they wont pay microsoft the fee to get them certified, which causes additional dialogs and security risk by installing un-signed drivers.
  • III-V - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    What the heck kind of drugs are you on?

    They're still digitally signed. They just don't go through Microsoft's worthless certification process.

    The two infamous card killing drivers of Nvidia's were WHQL drivers (320.18 WHQL, 196.75 WHQL).
  • Morawka - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    That us untrue, it still gives the warning on some versions of windows if they are self signed. Windows XP, and Windows 10 since it's considered a Kernal-Mode Driver

    Actually i see now that Microsoft doesn't even charge a fee anymore for WHQL, so its just a lack of effort on AMD's part, instead of being a financial one. (even when they charged it was only $250 per OS Family)

    This means AMD is doing this because they are working on them at the last minute, or up to the last minute, however you want to look at it. Either one means they are not tested for bugs much, and use their customers as driver testers.
  • freeskier93 - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Dude just stop. I've been running Windows 10 since early preview bulbils and I've never gotten any "additional dialogs" when installing AMD drivers.
  • Morawka - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WHQL_Testing
  • Cellar Door - Sunday, November 22, 2015 - link

    Seriously, please stop spreading misinformation. Do you realize how many non whql drivers Nvidia has released and everyone and their mother installed them perfectly fine and lived to tell it.
  • jasonelmore - Sunday, November 22, 2015 - link

    he is right about one thing, nvidia's game ready drivers have all been certified here lately. I can't remember the last time i downloaded a Beta nvidia driver.
  • dragonsqrrl - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    It is a "financial one". It's a lack of resources, not a lack of effort. It's well established that support, driver development and validation in particular, is the single most costly part of making a GPU.
  • Samus - Saturday, November 21, 2015 - link

    Listen, I don't think there is any debate here over who has better drivers. I currently run an AMD R9 285 and a R9 380 and the drivers are far more bloated, the interface is old fashioned/hasn't been updated in ages and getting bitstreaming to work over DisplayPort needed a reg hack and a 3rd party audio splitter.

    I didn't have any of those issues with my GTX770.
  • K_Space - Saturday, November 21, 2015 - link

    The latest Nvidia 395.0 drivers weigh in at 289mb versus AMD 15.7 245mb so the size is fairly comparable.
    AMD include their raptor application with Catlyst but its a case of a simple untick before installation. I cannot comment on whether Nvidia includes their GeForce Experience app (or even if it's a seperate app). AMD has been heavily talking about their new "Radeon Software Crimson Edition" new look though frankly I don't see what was wrong with the old one? As per the Anandtech comments under that article I'm not sure why people are so fussed about the old fashioned look; I might be missing something here but since my beta driver installation few months ago, I probably looked at the interface less than 5 minutes. In any case the taskbar icon is far quicker for my common tasks.
    Unfortunately I cannot comment on that last issue as I don't bitstream from my 295x2
  • inighthawki - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Being WHQL certified simply means that the driver passes Microsoft's test suite. There are no fees required to do so. Being WHQL certified also does not mean there are no bugs in the driver (just no bugs in the tests used to certify it).

    This also has nothing to do with being digitally signed, and certainly does not pose a "security risk", lol.
  • Chaser - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Couldn't agree more. Nvidia releases drivers to add new games if anything to their GeForce Experience database for one button optimization.
  • xthetenth - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Hopefully this one will fix the issues I've had for three driver releases straight. I've been having way more different issues on my maxwell card than a friend with a vliw card for crying out loud. I'm quite unimpressed of late with the quality of NV drivers. I've probably spent two months of the year with this 970 dealing with severely frustrating driver issues.
  • dragonsqrrl - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Intentionally vague? Care to elaborate?
  • mobutu - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    vidia released three drivers, from 04 nov to 19 nov.
    thats one driver per five days. too often imo.
    for now I'll keep using 358.50 from 07 oct cause I won't play any of the new shitty games for a long time anyway.
  • MrSpadge - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    And that's totally fine for you. On the other hand people playing the new games are probably happy about the new drivers.
  • xthetenth - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    I just keep hoping that the next one will fix the issue I'm having, to be honest.
  • thurston - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    What issue are you having, it might not be driver related? Never underestimate the importance of a high quality power supply being the foundation of a stable system.
  • makerofthegames - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    No issue fixes for Windows 10? So having the driver crash regularly on such GPU-heavy games as "Solitaire" or "the Start Menu" is a feature, then?
  • Chaser - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    Maybe you should try a super computer for those daunting tasks.
  • jwcalla - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    If MS can't get a Start Menu to display without crashing a video driver, you should probably take it up with them.
  • inighthawki - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    What makes you think that it is MS's fault for the video driver crashing? I'm using Windows 10 successfully on two machines - one with Haswell (Intel) and one with Kepler (NVIDIA) - and both have no issues with the start menu (or for that matter the long list of games I play on steam). This would suggest it is an issue with the driver that may be related to specific hardware.
  • Morawka - Friday, November 20, 2015 - link

    sounds like a hardware problem. Possibly GPU or PSU, or a dirty as hell windows install
  • richough3 - Saturday, November 21, 2015 - link

    I just think it's sad that video card drivers are about 300 MB now. I liked it when it was only a few MB in size.

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