Nvidia questions AMD driver benchmark results

In the ongoing battle for graphics card supremacy, California-based Nvidia dropped another bomb when it recently accused its main competitor AMD of manipulating benchmark tests of its Catalyst 10.10 drivers to gain a performance edge over GeForce GPUs.

In a blog post, Nvidia technical marketing director Nick Stam said several technology websites "found that changes introduced in AMD's Catalyst 10.10 default driver settings cause an increase in performance and a decrease in image quality."


He said these changes do not present a fair comparison to Nvidia's default driver settings, which provide higher image quality. Citing a report by ComputerBase, Stam notes that AMD cards gain a 10 percent advantage by using lower quality texture-filtering.

The AMD products in question include both the Catalyst 10.10 and 10.11 drivers, as well as the Radeon HD 5800 and 6000 series GPUS.

AMD has not responded to Nvidia's accusations.

This isn't the first time Nvidia has accused AMD of cooking the books. As Hexus noted, Nvidia also asserted AMD sacrificed image quality to gain an unfair advantage over its GTS 450.