As independent external experts in the software quality assurance and testing industry for over 20 years, QA Consultants has performed over 5,000 mission-critical projects and has extensive testing and depth experience in various industries. Headquartered in Toronto, Ontario, QA Consultants is the largest onshore software quality assurance company, with a 30,000 square foot, the industrial-grade facility called The Test Factory.
Commissioned by AMD, QA Consultants used Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Lab Kit (HLK) to perform a 12-day direct test by comparing the AMD graphics driver against the Nvidia graphics driver. The test compared 12 graphics cards, six from AMD and six from NVIDIA, running on 12 identical machines. All machines were configured with the Windows Update April 10, 2018. Both the game and the professional graphics cards were also represented in the tests.
Technical specifications of test equipment
| Gaming | Workstation | |
| OS | Microsoft Windows 10 with update of April 2018 | |
| AMD graphics card models | Radeon Vega RX 64 Radeon RX 580 8GB Radeon RX 560 |
Radeon Pro WX 9100 Radeon Pro WX 7100 Radeon Pro WX 3100 |
| AMD graphics driver version | Radeon Software Adrenalin Edition 18.5.1 | Radeon Pro Software Enterprise Edition 18.Q2 |
| NVIDIA graphics card models | GeForce GTX 1080 Ti GeForce GTX 1060 – 6 GB GeForce GTX 1050 – 2 GB |
Quadro P5000 Quadro P4000 Quadro P600 |
| NVIDIA graphics driver version | GeForce Game Ready Driver 397.64 | Quadro Desktop 391.58 |
| System configuration | Processor Intel Core i5 8400 Motherboard MSI Z370-A PRO Motherboard Memory RAM ADATA XPG Z1 16 GB DDR4 SSD Samsung 860 EVO 250GB Power source Corsair CX Series CX750 |
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| Display | HP Z24x @ 1920 x 1200 Display Port or mini-Display Port |
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Summary of Results
The following table adds results for all AMD products and all NVIDIA products. Faults represent locks detected by Windows HLK and system crashes.
| Scheduled tests | Fallas | Approval rate | |
| AMD | 432 | 31 | 92.8% |
| NVIDIA | 432 | 76 | 82.4% |
After running for 12 days of 24-hour stress tests, the AMD product addition passed 93% of the scheduled tests. The addition of NVIDIA products passed 82% of the scheduled tests.
Conclusion
As graphics cards progress in capacity, more of the graphics driver is required. A good user experience depends on a stable and reliable software stack. Using Microsoft’s Windows HLK CRASthe H, we ran 12 days of 24-hour testing to assess the stability of a set of leading market vendor graphics drivers.
In our testing, both AMD and workstation graphics cards performed better than NVIDIA products. Based on our testing of the 12 graphics cards mentioned above, we believe AMD has the most stable graphics driver in the industry.