Anything you can do...
AMD claimed the industry's first Windows 7 unified graphics driver when it released ATI Catalyst 9.3. At the start of this week, coinciding with the public availability of the Release Candidate of Windows 7, AMD announced its Windows 7 driver had received Windows Hardware Quality Lab (WHQL) certification.
Not to be out-done, NVIDIA today announced it is "the first hardware vendor to release Windows 7 WHQL certified drivers for all PC platforms". By this it's referring to all ION, GeForce and Quadro products.
This may have been the catalyst (pun intended) for AMD to publish what appears to be a superfluous press release today, which merely reminded us what it had said in its announcement at the start of the week. To add to the slightly grubby sense of elbowing and jostling for Windows 7 kudos, we even got some competing quotes.
"As the only processor company offering DirectX 10.1 graphics hardware support and a unified WDDM 1.1 graphics driver for both Windows 7 and Windows Vista, AMD continues to work closely with Microsoft to deliver a visually superior and dynamic computing experience," said David Kenyon, VP of worldwide channel marketing at AMD.
"For gaming, video transcoding, and an overall better computing experience on Windows 7, users now have the peace of mind knowing that we have the official Microsoft WHQL stamp of approval," countered Dwight Diercks, VP of software engineering at NVIDIA.
We think they've both done equally well and both deserve a reward from Microsoft for being so clever.
