Nvidia is no stranger to criticizing AMD, and more recently, Intel, as the three companies duke it out for thebest graphics cards. Earlier this year,Nvidia jabbed at AMDfor its drivers, claiming that optional or beta drivers (which AMD frequently releases) are “sub-par” and don’t provide a “smooth user experience.”

And Nvidia is at it again, shortly before AMD is set to release its newRX 7900 XTX graphics card.

For anyone keeping track of driver releases for gamers:#GeForce#GameReadyDriverspic.twitter.com/yurEIWsVBH

— Sean Pelletier (@PellyNV)June 15, 2025

The crux of Nvidia’s argument, which you can discern from the chart above and ablog post Nvidia wrote in April, is that AMD and Intel provide far fewer certified drivers and instead rely on beta drivers in between major releases. That’s true, as Nvidia has continued to build its Game Ready Driver program over the past several years. But it doesn’t inherently mean Nvidia’s drivers are better by default.

Certification comes from WHQL, or Windows Hardware Quality Labs. In short, whenever a new driver is developed, Nvidia sends it through a rigorous test list from Microsoft to verify that it’s stable on Windows. It’s a seal of approval, but that doesn’t mean beta or optional drivers are automatically unstable.

If you track AMD’s driver history, most recent beta drivers are turned into WHQL-certified drivers a couple of weeks after being out in the wild. The most recent version 22.11.2 was released as a beta driver on December 1 as a beta driver and on December 8 as a WHQL driver. The same goes for the previous version which launch on November 16 as a beta driver and November 22 as a WHQL driver.

In addition, WHQL means the driver itself is stable, but it doesn’t necessarily mean the games supported are. Nvidia’s GeForce Game Ready driver 526.98 that included Game Readysupport forWarhammer 40,000: Darktide,for example, launched alongside the game crashing with DLSS 3 or ray tracing enabled. That wasn’t on the driver, it was on the game itself, but it’s a good illustration of what “Game Ready” actually means.

New drivers can still cause issues on the Nvidia front, too. In October, Nvidiaconfirmed an issue with its WHQL driverinsideCall of Duty Modern Warfare 2,which itpatched in a hotfix shortly after(what you might call a “beta” or “optional” driver). A few weeks after that, Game Ready support was included in a WHQL driver, which is very similar to how AMD has handled its driver rollouts recently.

Nvidia’s Game Ready program relies on close developer interaction to fix driver-based issues before the game and driver are released, which allows Nvidia to add more “official” support for games as they’re released. That doesn’t mean games that aren’t explicitly listed won’t work. In years of having both an AMD and Nvidia machine close by, I’ve never encountered a game that worked on Nvidia that refused to work on AMD. That wasn’t always true in years past, which is areality Intel is currently facing with its drivers.

Drivers are a vital part of GPU performance in games, but Nvidia’s claim that its drivers are better simply because they’re WHQL Certified doesn’t hold ground. The more important aspect is that drivers continue to deliver performance improvements and fix bugs over time, which is something Nvidia and AMD deliver on.

In July,AMD delivered a driverthat could provide upwards of a 92% boost in some specific games. And in October, Nvidia released a driver thatprovided up to a 24% jumpin a game as big asAssassin’s Creed Valhalla.

Third-party testing showsthat AMDandNvidiahave both provided overall improvements over the year, delivering higher frame rates simply through driver optimization. That’s what’s important about new GPU drivers between AMD and Nvidia.

If you’re sitting on an old driver, make sure to follow our guide onhow to upgrade your GPU drivers. You might be sitting on untapped performance, regardless of your GPU brand.