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Renewing AMD's Commitment to Stability

andrej_zdravkovic
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[Originally posted on 07/16/18.]

Whether you are using multiple GPUs in a workstation for a complex rendering job or competing in an intense eSports tournament, seeing a frozen screen indicating that your graphics driver has crashed can be more than just an inconvenience. It can have real costs such as lost productivity and time. Along with the most requested features and top performance, driver stability has always been one of the core priorities of the drivers supporting AMD’s Radeon GPUs. AMD has conducted independent driver audits in 20051 and 20102 which verified the stability of our drivers in those years.

A new report3 from QA Consultants4, a Toronto-based software testing and quality assurance firm, has put six of AMD’s most popular cards to the test (high, medium and budget level cards from our Gaming and Workstation lines respectively) to see how our driver holds up against a marathon of intense graphic tests. QA Consultants ran identical tests on the six Nvidia graphics cards that correspond most closely to the tested AMD cards.

The Systems:

The tested graphics hardware, drivers and system configurations can be found in the table below:

02-Graph.png

The Tests:

The team at QA Consultants ran each of the systems through multiple instances of CRASH, a four-hour automated program in Microsoft’s Hardware Lab Kit (“HLK”). CRASH contains a variety of graphical functions across DirectX 9, 10 and 11 including changes in resolution, color settings, screen rotations, color overlays, sleeping and waking up. Each system ran the four hour CRASH test, non-stop 6 times per day back-to-back for 12 days (for a total of 72 runs per system). Completing the entire four-hour CRASH routine would be considered a pass. Any application crashes, hangs or “blue screens of death” would be considered an immediate fail. The overall stability score was derived from the total number of passes divided by the total number of attempts. For simplicity, the results for all AMD and Nvidia systems respectively were aggregated into a single score for each of their drivers.

The Results:

After all tests were run (432 tests across six AMD and six Nvidia systems respectively), AMD systems passed 401 out of 432 tests while Nvidia systems passed 356. This is equivalent to a pass rate of 93% for AMD systems vs a pass rate of 82% for Nvidia systems. According to the QA Consultants report: “AMD has the most stable driver in the industry.”

The Takeaway:

Driver stability is a consistent priority for AMD and our engineering team is dedicated to testing and refining each new update to ensure users can depend on their Radeon cards. With the results of the QA Consultants report, we’re pleased to see the results of that commitment to stability that we’ll continue into the future of Radeon products.

To download a more detailed version of the report, visit: qaconsultants.com/stabilityaudit.

Andrej Zdravkovic is AMD’s Corporate Vice President of Software and Platform Solutions. His postings are his own opinions and may not represent AMD’s positions, strategies or opinions. Links to third party sites are provided for convenience and unless explicitly stated, AMD is not responsible for the contents of such linked sites and no endorsement is implied.

Footnotes:

  1. ATI Catalyst 5.6 Stability Final Report – https://www.amd.com/Documents/AppLabs-Stability-Benchmark-Test.pdf
  2. Project Final Report: Catalyst Stability Testing – https://www.amd.com/Documents/PerseusLabs-Catalyst-Stability-Testing.pdf
  3. “Graphics Driver Quality – Determination of Stability from Leading Market Vendors”- https://www.amd.com/system/files/documents/graphics-driver-quality.pdf
  4. In May 2018, AMD commissioned QA Consultants to independently evaluate the stability of several of the latest graphics drivers from both AMD and NVIDIA.