Nvidia could now leave Intel and AMD completely in the dust with AI-optimized drivers

When it comes to graphics cards, the hardware itself is only a part of the performance equation as well-built software to complement that is almost equally as important. Drivers help to enable various features inside the hardware itself, reduce overhead, among other things. Here is a glaring example of it where one of Intel's recent Arc drivers boosted the performance of games on older APIs by close to 80%. New games like NFS Unbound saw twice the performance. Here are another couple of examples, this time from AMD where there was a hefty performance boost in DirectX 11 and in OpenGL.

Recently, Nvidia touted its WHQL-signed display driver release frequency showing how much better its release cycle was compared to Intel and AMD. The Green Team boasted not only more frequent WHQL drivers but also a higher number of games supported.

And now, Nvidia may be taking this driver development gulf to the next level. According to a new report by CapFrameX, the company is purportedly working on integrating artificial intelligence (AI) into its display driver optimization process. Rumor has it that the first such drivers will allegedly be released this year in Q1 itself, and it could bring up to 30% improvement with an average of about 10% gains.

The report is unconfirmed at the moment however it is not totally unlikely either. AI has been at the forefront of Nvidia's recent innovations and the technology in general has been getting more mainstream gradually. Hence, if true, Nvidia could jump significantly ahead of Intel and AMD, at least not until the latter come up with their own similar solutions.

On the somewhat related topic of optimization, there is good news for AMD Ryzen users as the company recently confirmed further Windows 11 optimization, at least for its new Ryzen 7000X3D chips.