AMD vs Nvidia: Whose Driver Updates Improve Performance More?

AmazingAvery

Tom's article makes for interesting reading - https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-nvidia-driver-updates-performance-tested,5707.html

We wanted to get a sense of how much updated drivers improve performance, so we zeroed in on a pair of popular mainstream cards: AMD’s Radeon RX 480 and Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 1060 6GB. We benchmarked each card in 11 different games, using three different driver builds that were released in a two-year time span. Nvidia's card improved the most, an average of 4.3 percent per game versus 2.3 percent for AMD. 

Interesting considering BF1 and Ashes are DX12 tested.

Game	AMD Improvement	Nvidia Improvement	Who Wins?
Battlefield 3	1.8%	2.7%	Nvidia ends up 12.1% faster than AMD
Battlefield 4	2.4%	0.1%	Nvidia ends up 26.6% faster than AMD
Metro: Last Light Redux	1.1%	0.7%	Nvidia ends up 14.1% faster than AMD
Grand Theft Auto V	4.0%	1.4%	Nvidia ends up 30.5% faster than AMD
The Witcher 3	3.2%	0.1%	AMD ends up 2.7% faster than Nvidia
Rise of the Tomb Raider	13.5%	3.8%	Nvidia ends up 2.5% faster than AMD
Hitman	0.3%	15.3%	AMD ends up 4.2% faster than Nvidia
Tom Clancy's The Division	-2.3%	6.5%	AMD ends up 0.3% faster than Nvidia
Battlefield 1	-4.7%	3.6%	Nvidia ends up 2.4% faster than AMD
Ashes of the Singularity: Escalation	-3.7%	12.8%	Nvidia ends up 8.5% faster than AMD
Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Wildlands	9.6%	-0.2%	Nvidia ends up 4.5% faster than AMD

Ridelynn

Looks more like mediocre box wine?

Neither is terribly impressive.

Quizzical

Large improvements from drivers tend to come after a vendor launches a major new architecture that is very different from what they had before.  That means that, with the initial drivers, they hadn't yet figured out how to optimize properly for their new architecture.  With some additional experience, they figure it out and performance goes up.

Nvidia hasn't launched a major new architecture since Maxwell in 2014.  For AMD, you have to go all the way back to GCN in 2012.  So no, I wouldn't expect huge improvements from new drivers for those cards.

AmazingAvery

I think that improvements come from both knowing your products capability, working with publishers and partners, having dedicated resources and being able to leverage improvements through code enhancements (drivers) that allow folks to get the best out of their purchase and investment (GPU). Having the time from then till now allows optimization so new drivers should make games people play that are a few years old better. After all most mmorpg players play their mmo's for a while (consistently and on and off).