Why Nvidia takes graphics drivers so seriously and why it matters to gamers

pocket-lint.com:

(Pocket-lint) — PC games rely heavily on the graphics drivers that support them. GPU drivers can make or break a game launch and so Nvidia takes these things seriously.

Naturally, the perceived quality of a graphics card is heavily influenced by the drivers that support it. The hardware can be incredibly well crafted but if the drivers cause constant crashes, dreaded blue screen errors, game stutters, lag or worse then everyone suffers. 

This is why Nvidia takes drivers so seriously.

Especially when the company is keen to push the possibility of gaming at 8K 60Hz with HDR turned on. Those bold claims were made for the GeForce RTX 3090 and RTX 3090 Ti graphics cards and no surprise considering the sheer power of these GPUs but it could still falter with a bad driver. 

Nvidia, therefore, puts a lot of weight on thoroughly testing drivers before launch. The company knows there a vast amount of gaming PCs out there with all sorts of configurations. Therefore getting the drivers to be as robust as possible requires a lot of testing. 

As part of Nvidia's Game Ready Driver program, the company puts a heavy focus on extensive testing across thousands of possible hardware configurations. This testing is designed to ensure that every gamer gets the best possible performance and has a reliable system too. 

Nvidia says that it carries out 1,000 reliability tests a day. That's equivalent to 1.8 million hours of testing per year which is equivalent to 214 years worth of thorough testing. Nvidia employs a complicated testing matrix which tests with over 4,500 different PC configurations including various graphics cards, CPUs, RAM and more. Even going as far as to test hardware that dates back to 2012. 

It's this pride in getting things