Where Are the AMD Catalyst WHQL Driver Updates?
Rikki Wright / 9 years ago
AMD are NVIDIA’s major competitors, we all know that. Graphics cards sales, performance and price are just some of the factors between them, but one that probably gets overlooked a little more is the after sales; namely the drivers.
AMD do release new drivers, just last month saw the release of Catalyst 15.4 Beta ready for GTA V. However, that is just a beta driver and hasn’t been certified like the previous Omega 14.12 WHQL driver. This was released over 160 days ago, almost half a year; which could only mean bad things for AMD.
Take NVIDIA for example, we see WHQL drivers released on a much more regular basis under the ‘Game Ready’ initiative. The last drive was 350.12, optimised for GTA V back on April 13th; the most recent is the 352.86 driver, optimised for Witcher 3 released on May 18th. In the meantime, NVIDIA release interim patches for drivers, but you can definitely see a stark contrast between the support from AMD to NVIDIA.
Even though AMD are set to release a ‘Titan X’ killer towards the end of June, we are unlikely set to see a new driver emerge in the upcoming weeks; that could mean a driver delay of around 200 days. The performance is one thing, having regular updates to ensure it still has the performance in newer games is another.
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Thank you to TechPowerUp for providing us with this information.