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What you say is confusing and has the smell of a well crafted lie. Can you set me straight so I can understand why Nvidia is unable to do like Intel and fully co-operate with the free software community?

Have a look at NVidia's OpenGL specifications web-page

Every extensions comes with an IP Status field. For example ARB_color_buffer_float has the following:

IP Status

        SGI owns US Patent #6,650,327, issued November 18, 2003. SGI
        believes this patent contains necessary IP for graphics systems
        implementing floating point (FP) rasterization and FP framebuffer
        capabilities.

        SGI will not grant the ARB royalty-free use of this IP for use in
        OpenGL, but will discuss licensing on RAND terms, on an individual
        basis with companies wishing to use this IP in the context of
        conformant OpenGL implementations. SGI does not plan to make any
        special exemption for open source implementations.

        Contact Doug Crisman at SGI Legal for the complete IP disclosure.

Q: ... People seem to be especially interested in better 2D acceleration, hardware MPEG-4/H264 acceleration ...

A: (Nothing Related to video acceleration)

I'm one of those people who are interested in better 2D acceleration and hardware MPEG-4/H264 acceleration. I'm a MythTV user. Nvidia's hardware does have support for such acceleration; they call it Purevideo. Unfortunately, the Linux drivers don't support it. Supposedly, it will be supported "in the future". But it's really frustrating. The new 7050PV chipset would be perfect for a high-definition, relatively low-powered (meaning quiet) MythTV system. But alas, the HD decoding features of that chip aren't (yet) supported in Linux, and therefore you still need a beefy processor to do HD in MythTV.

Instead, I think the way to go is with Intel integrated GPUs. They don't have MPEG acceleration yet, but they are working on APIs and drivers to greatly improve this (the hardware has very good video support). I'm hoping Intel GPUs quickly become the far and away best option for Myth users.. let open source prevail.

I wish Intel would release a standalone video card. This would be perfect for my workstation: an enthusiast motherboard for overclocking, but an ordinary video card (since I don't game on this machine). The problem is, the best overclocking motherboards rarely have onboard video.

Q: ... People seem to be especially interested in better 2D acceleration, hardware MPEG-4/H264 acceleration ...

A: (Nothing Related to video acceleration)

I'm one of those people who are interested in better 2D acceleration and hardware MPEG-4/H264 acceleration. I'm a MythTV user. Nvidia's hardware does have support for such acceleration; they call it Purevideo. Unfortunately, the Linux drivers don't support it. Supposedly, it will be supported "in the future". But it's really frustrating. The new 7050PV chipset would be perfect for a high-definition, relatively low-powered (meaning quiet) MythTV system. But alas, the HD decoding features of that chip aren't (yet) supported in Linux, and therefore you still need a beefy processor to do HD in MythTV.

Instead, I think the way to go is with Intel integrated GPUs. They don't have MPEG acceleration yet, but they are working on APIs and drivers to greatly improve this (the hardware has very good video support). I'm hoping Intel GPUs quickly become the far and away best option for Myth users.. let open source prevail.

I wish Intel would release a standalone video card. This would be perfect for my workstation: an enthusiast motherboard for overclocking, but an ordinary video card (since I don't game on this machine). The problem is, the best overclocking motherboards rarely have onboard video.

One thing that seriously blows about nVidia is their (closed-source) drivers are buggy. e.g. the nv4_disp infinite loop bug. This is year sold, affects many generations of cards, and nVidia *still* haven't fixed it. Fixed it? You can't even talk to them about it. They don't answer any tech support questions: Their forums are user-to-user. If this driver was open source, someone would have fixed it by now. It'd be quicker than the black-box game people have played to fix it.

Read it and weep:
http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4432& st=80
http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/nvidia-nv 4disp-problem/
http://fileforum.betanews.com/review/950852325/1/v iew
http://forums.2cpu.com/archive/index.php/t-10410.h tml
http://www.tech-forums.net/pc/f77/3d-games-kill-my -pc-need-advice-111501/

I'll share my fix for the nVidia nv4_disp infinite loop bug.

1. Shut down windows.
2. Power off PC.
3. Remove nVidia card.
4. Throw in trash.
5. Install ATI card.

It seems, most of the critics of the closed-source drivers happily shut up, when they get drivers for their platform.

Manufacturers have learned this long ago — they release binary drivers for Linux/i386, and the criticism all but disappears. NVidia has gone farther than most by releasing Linux/amd64 and even FreeBSD/i386 binaries.

But FreeBSD/amd64 is not there... Nor are Open|NetBSD... Nor Linux/ppc.

I know, each additional platform costs plenty. But it is the source, I'm asking, not binaries. If — as the case may be — the most modern version of NVidia drivers can't be built on FreeBSD/amd64 due to feature FOO missing on the platform, I could #ifdef that feature out myself. Earlier versions of the driver weren't using FOO even on i386...

Is it a bad thing that people are still having problems with the card 2 years later? Maybe, but at the same time it's an outdated card (multiple newer-gen cards have been released since), yet people continue to offer support and help people to resolve issues and newer driver releases still have updates for old cards. I'd prefer that situation after dealing with ATI's non-existent support anyday. Granted that almost two years have passed and I certainly hope that ATI has improved support across platforms nowadays and would hope the ATI community is as helpful for supporting old (and new) products, but until I can confidently assume that ATI will offer equal or better driver and customer support than Nvidia, I don't see myself going back.

Err... I think you mean 8, with four threads per core. To the OS it looks like a 32-way machine on one chip. It's Intel that has been in the news again recently about its 80-core research chip. And then there's those GPUs with 128 cores on them that you can program in C.

If you are using the NVIDIA Vista driver and need to report a bug, use this page http://www.nvidia.com/object/vistaqualityassurance .html

You might try downloading the driver directly from nVidia rather than wait around for your laptop manufacturer to update their drivers. Dunno about nVidia, but for ATI is pumping out updated vista drivers once a month now that keep getting better & faster.

nVidia claims they support the 6150, but that might not mean it has the brains required to do Aero. It is a hardware thing, not just a memory thing:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_158.18_s upported.html

A huge disclaimer: while using the drivers on nvidia.com (or ati.com) is usually okay on a desktop, on a laptop you might start getting weird problems. I tried using nVidia's native XP drivers on my laptop once, and it would never wake up from hibernation again. YMMV.

You're saying you upgrade all your drivers, but then say you only needed to upgrade the wireless drivers?

Anyway, I'm not sure what Forceware drivers you're on, but I highly recommend 158.18 if your graphics card is supported:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/winvista_x86_158.18.h tml

NVIDIA used to be great, but its shoddy driver sucks now for Windows. I can't use the 8x.xx with my GeForce 7950 GT KO PCIE card. :( It's nice that NVIDIA still rocks for Linux compared to crappy ATI's Linux support, but it seems like Windows drivers are going downhill like ATI's. Ugh! I am stuck between two card manufactures. Yes, I know about other brands but I play games so...

NVIDIA, I want my TV display overlay ratio corrected now! Release new versions with the fix already!!!!!! Also, Vista users are angry too.

Apple would be better off buying nVidia.
Apple Electronics products focus on multimedia, computing, communications, graphics, photos, music, and videos.

Intel is piping the latest and greatest Quad Core and SoC chips into Apple,
If Apple buys AMD - I'm going to guess the 'Apple-Intel' Relationship will become quite Strained...

If Apple bought AMD, would AMD still sell chips to others?
Intel could change the x86 product line -just enough- to render AMD Apples incompatible with PCs, then what?

AMD couldn't just GIVE CPUs to Apple - They still would have to sell them slightly above cost to the 'Parent Apple',
and Intel could do everything possible to undermine that effort.

nVidia chips could be put to use in Apple Phones, AppleTV products, and Apple Macintosh computers,
cheaper High Power GPUs mounted directly to the motherboard...

"I would think there would be a healthy market for a 'cell accelerator card', especially in the world I come from (Modeling and Simulation)..."

Or you could get a DX10 card and use CUDA

...is that they'll simply leave the PC itself out of the equation. This idea was a thought that came to me as I read about the GF8500/8600s 100% hardware acceleration of H.264, if they're doing all the processing why involve the CPU as a trusted party at all? Just have the Blu-Ray / HD-DVD player negotiate a key directly with the graphics card, while the CPU only shuffles encrypted data like an Internet node in a SSH connection. That means there'd be no need for trusted software, an open source linux player could just as easily and securely do it. It'd be a lot easier than locking down the BIOS, CPU, system bus, memory+++ and not give Microsoft a free lock-in and make them the keyholder of all HTPCs (you'd think MPAA could take a clue from RIAA and Apple).

Actually to me it looks like a high end workstation, so having as much GPU power as possible is probably a good idea. I imagine 8 cores and dual Quadro FX 5600's would make one hell of a CAD station =)

The vector processors never went away. They just became your graphics card: 128 floating point units at your command

BTW, here is a real article on TRIPS.

I doubt you'll be able to access the advanced features in OpenGL that rely on DX10, though.

Yeah, you can. OpenGL extensions are already available.

CUDA is only hardware accelerated by cards in this series. http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html

"I, among others, have yet to see a convincing arguement to buy a DX-10 capable video card"

Oh, yea of little experience.

I use SuSE Linux since 6.2 version and currenlty use OpenSuSE 10.2 . No problem with nVidia driver just add http://download.nvidia.com/opensuse/10.2 to YAST install sources. It will complain that "module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel" but works perfectly.
OpenSuSE is a good distro, only this Novell/MS relationship annoys me a little bit.

Of course not :( http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_18897.html

If you're using nVidia, TwinView is your friend. It's also part of the reason I still find nVidia a little more palatable in linux than ATI.

You're probably a digg troll, but anyway:
Linux, Solaris and FreeBSD drivers for Nvidia graphics cards are here:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

The parent AC says that there are no powerpc linux drivers for nvidia cards, the only ppc drivers are Darwin's released with OSX and closed source.

I have no idea if the drivers where written by Apple with Nvidia specs or if Nvidia wrote the drivers and sold them to apple as you imply. But who cares? Surely Apple has no interest in releasing a linux version (even if closed source), Nvidia should probably care about it because it may help them to sell more cards... we're speaking of a product that's not even sold anymore, Nvidia doesn't care too.

Anyway 3d acceleration support under linux would surely make the powerbooks and ibooks G4 more interesting, as they are relatively cheap on ebay nowadays.

This is a good step, but support from nVidia in the past has been poor. I bought an nVidia 5700 two years ago and the driver hangs. This is known popularly as the "nv4_disp infinite loop bug". Searched on Google and many others have had the same problem. But you can't get anything done about it, and it affects the 6xxx and 7xxx series cards too.

nVidia tell you to technical support requests must go to the OEM card maker. But all the OEM card maker does is slap chips on a board. They don't know about the inner workings of drivers and nVidia know that. If you ask on the nVidia forum, they always say "download and install the latest driver". I and many others have been doing that for the last two years and it makes no difference. The funny thing is nVidia don't have any presence on their own forums. As they say their 'User Forums' are "with your fellow NVIDIA users". *NOT* nVidia!!!! They offer e-mail support.. for products purchased but *ONLY OFF* the nVidia website. But nVidia sell their cards through OEMs!!! In other words, you can't get any support from them. http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4432& st=100 http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html

So, nVidia, you've been slowly trashing your own name for years. Glad you're taking this issue seriously, but your lack of support on all your past cards is chasing us into the arms of ATI. I hope they can do better. In the tech industry you can't sell a box without support and expect to keep a good name.

This is a good step, but support from nVidia in the past has been poor. I bought an nVidia 5700 two years ago and the driver hangs. This is known popularly as the "nv4_disp infinite loop bug". Searched on Google and many others have had the same problem. But you can't get anything done about it, and it affects the 6xxx and 7xxx series cards too.

nVidia tell you to technical support requests must go to the OEM card maker. But all the OEM card maker does is slap chips on a board. They don't know about the inner workings of drivers and nVidia know that. If you ask on the nVidia forum, they always say "download and install the latest driver". I and many others have been doing that for the last two years and it makes no difference. The funny thing is nVidia don't have any presence on their own forums. As they say their 'User Forums' are "with your fellow NVIDIA users". *NOT* nVidia!!!! They offer e-mail support.. for products purchased but *ONLY OFF* the nVidia website. But nVidia sell their cards through OEMs!!! In other words, you can't get any support from them. http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=4432& st=100 http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html

So, nVidia, you've been slowly trashing your own name for years. Glad you're taking this issue seriously, but your lack of support on all your past cards is chasing us into the arms of ATI. I hope they can do better. In the tech industry you can't sell a box without support and expect to keep a good name.

This could really boost the NVIDIA Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) hence number crunching projects like the Netflix Prize, which needs a second wind right about now due to a slowdown of progress in recent weeks. This depends, of course, on the detected error not being critical to the programs compiled for the 8800 hardware by CUDA, and on NVIDIA making the returned 8800s available for CUDA programmers.

If you are a gamer at all, your biggest concern has to be your video card drivers. If you have and Nvidia card, check here. You will read many stories of video corruption or SLI failing to work.

Obviously this would be a concern for anyone upgrading to Vista, but there doesn't seem to be too much trouble for just basic 2D and Aero functionality...

Play HD DVD and Blu-ray movies on your PC with PureVideo HD technology.

Available on HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs, high-definition movies are bringing an exciting new video experience to PC users. NVIDIA® PureVideo(TM) HD technology lets you enjoy cinematic-quality HD DVD and Blu-ray movies with low CPU utilization and power consumption, allowing higher quality movie playback and picture clarity.

But wait, only these cards are supported: nvidia's list of cards

But hrmmm...it seems that the 8800GTS has regular purevideo, so I can watch Blu-Ray, but not in HD, if the Image Constraint Token Advanced Access Copy System copy protection scheme is enabled on the HDCP graphics card through the DVI out. nvidia's faq

IMHO, this is total bullshit. Did I get this right? Hopefully, there will be some sort of software hack, or small pci card that I can plug into my motherboard or usb port to actually watch hdtv and blu-ray, without buying a new video card...grrr.

My question is what advantage will they get from plugging these coprocessors into CPU sockets, as opposed to PCIe risers?

The advantage is that it's easier to do "general purpose" stream processing on them, instead of just graphics.

Does the coprocessor realy need to be cache coherent? If it is, how do you deal with interrupt handling? Does the GPU run independant threads that are peers to CPU threads?

Right now, with DirectX 9 parts? No. With Vista and DirectX 10 and CUDA and whatnot? Absolutely!

What platform-specific hardware do I have then? ATI X1900 XTX, a Creative Live! 24-bit soundcard, an nForce 560 motherboard, an AMD 64 3800+ processor that I put together myself. Obviously so substandard that it Supreme Commander is playable at 1280x1024 at maximum graphics quality, and under Vista it hasn't crashed once. Ubuntu tried to tell me my hard-drive was corrupt when I tried to install it. Running off the live CD it couldn't detect my keyboard. These are problems that I wouldn't expect from any OS, and with Windows I didn't have them.

Face it, if I could find a distro that worked properly I could just move, but I don't want to.

Stop making excuses.

Personally I don't think it's quantum computers that will be the breakthrough, but simply a different architecture for conventional computers. Let me go on a little tangent here.

Now that we've reached the limits of the Von Neumann architecture, we're starting to see a new wave of innovation in CPU design. The Cell is part of that, but also the stuff ATI and NVIDIA are doing is also very interesting. Instead of one monolithic processor connected to a giant memory through a tiny bottleneck, processors of the future will be a grid of processing elements interleaved with embedded memory in a network structure. Almost like a Beowulf cluster on a chip.

People are worried about how conventional programs will scale to these new architectures, but I believe they won't have to. Code monkeys won't be writing code to spawn thousands of cooperating threads to run the logic of a C++ application faster. Instead, PhDs will write specialized libraries to leverage all that parallel processing power for specific algorithms. You'll have a raytracing library, an image processing library, an FFT library, etc. These specialized libraries will have no problem sponging up all the excess computing resources, while your traditional software continues to run on just two or three traditional cores.

Back on the subject of AI, my theory is that these highly parallel architectures will be much more suited to simulating the highly parallel human brain. They will excel at the kinds pattern matching tasks our brains eat for breakfast. Computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing; all of these will be highly amenable to parallelization. And it is these applications which will eventually prove the worth of non-traditional architectures like Intel's 80-core chip. It may still be a long time before the sentient computer is unveiled, but I think we will soon finally start seeing real-world AI applications like decent automated translation, image labeling, and usable stereo vision for robot navigation. Furthermore, I predict that Google will be on the forefront of this new AI revolution, developing new algorithms to truly understand web content to reject spam and improve rankings.

Yes, you used to have to do everything in a graphical environment, but not any more. With nVidia's CUDA you program in C/C++, have a general memory model (you can access texture memory if it's efficient for what you need, but you also have general device memory and several other types of memory to choose from) and run on fully capable stream processors. As far as the programmer is concerned, the gpu is just a stream processor add-in card. You do have to manually transfer to and from device memory, but once you have your data on the gpu you're free to access it however you want (arrays, textures, linear memory, whatever). It's not a difficult system to understand, though tuning your program for performance will be challenging. Check out http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html for more info.

It did detect *my* widescreen laptop (new HP nx9420). Looked damn ugly though (low res) with the VESA driver.
With the AMD/ATI fglrx driver loaded I get 1680x1050. You should be even better off if you have an NVIDIA graphics card.

http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp

http://ati.amd.com/support/driver.html

Right. Which is why the OSS community is making such a big deal of them *now* - because the functionality has been around for ages ? Maybe that would also explain why, until quite recently, those fancy features were nowhere to be seen ?

I've been playing around with XGL for a couple of years. However, I couldn't remember when I first heard about it, so I looked it up. The earliest reference I found was an email from David Reveman dated Nov 4, 2004. The first I heard about AIGLX was in February 2006. nVidia presented a paper at XDevConf that talked about it. I don't have the history of development of Apple's Quartz Compositor handy. Maybe a Mac user can add that information? However, I believe it predates XGL. To be fair, Windows Aero Desktop Compositing Engine was first demoed in 2003.

I can just see that you're going to pull out some example from SGI

I was going to give Sun's Looking Glass as an example. However, the earliest material I can find on that is 2004. Maybe Microsoft was first on this one. However, to be fair, you couldn't use Aero until recently.

XGL/AIGLX has come a long way in a short time. It's biggest problem has historically been lack of interest and poor 3D support in Linux. I'm glad there is finally some interest being generated.

For those of you who care about having free software / open source drivers, email ATI or NVIDIA. Maybe if enough of us can email them telling them that having open source drivers (or at least hardware specs to enable their development) would be a deciding factor in our purchase. I'm hoping that with the somewhat recent acquisition of ATI by AMD that maybe we'll get lucky. If not, those of us who care about such things, will have to go for the Intel driver.

Maybe if the free software, or open source arguments don't work, an economic incentive will.

http://support.ati.com/ics/survey/survey.asp?deptI D=894&surveyID=508&type=web - ATI's feedback page.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/feedback_temp.html - NVIDIA's feedback page, although unfortunately still under construction.

I have an 8800GTX since Nov 15. Being a corporate customer, we've also had the various flavors of vista since Nov 30th. The new shiny 100.xx drivers are complete and utter crap across the board. The nVidia card touted as the ultimate in vista preparedness, the 8800, barely works on vista at all. See nVidia forums The class action stie and my own video. There are thousands of folks out there with issues. The nvidia drivers thread (70+ pages) has been deleted at least 3 times that I know of (from before the Jan 30th launch).

In my youtube video.. just using windows can cause the machine to spazz out randomly. For example.. I can't hit control-a to select all my icons.. it crashes the driver? WTF nVidia?

To make matters worse, nvidia appear to have thunked the 32 bit drivers into 64 bit address space... so there doesn't seem to be a true 64 bit driver out there for vista at all. Can anyone comment on this??

The 97.xx drivers.. what Microsoft shipped with vista.. are probably the best and most stable drivers at this point. On some of the other forums the reviewers have gone back to "stock" drivers for Intel and nVidia hardware.. and this eliminates some of the apparent vista stability issues. Some people have had ok luck out of the 100.xx drivers..

The truth is, I think, no one expects the vista drivers for hardware we already have to be this amazing break through. What is a bit scary is that the driver support is apparently so poor at this point in time... and it is poorest on hardware supposedly designed with vista in mind. The RTM drivers for vista/older cards aren't that bad.. they're playable in a lot of cases.. A lot of people, myself included, are having problems with source engine games IF the settings are cranked up way high. 800x600? No problem. 1920x1200 4xAA 4xAF.. Heloooo Pink Checkerboard Textures!

I'm not too terribly miffed I can't game quite as well on XP SP2... I am more than a little disappointed the drivers are buggy for basic things like.. screensaver... overlay video playback... being up for more than 4 hours? Given the state of Vista and that the graphics subsystem hasn't really changed much since RC1 I would have expected much better drivers-- especially since there are all these vista techdemos floating around.. at least in the case of the 8800+vista.

As in : If a video card is DX9 compatible, it is Vista Ready.

Personally I would want the card to be able to support DX10 (like the GeForce 8800 http://www.nvidia.com/page/8800_features.html) since that will be the whole reason to eventually upgrade to Vista for gamers.

DX10 == Vista ready to me, and since it will be a while before I upgrade I don't care if the drivers don't work yet, they will in time and I am sure they will be better than ATI/AMD's drivers like usual.

Actually, the problem is bigger than that.

There's no drivers for any nForce motherboard chipsets whatsoever.

Yeah, enough drivers to basically boot are loaded "in the box" with Vista, but little things like a sound drivers, RAID drivers and a gigabit LAN driver that works faster than 10 base T aren't available anywhere. Not even beta drivers are available.

At the same time they're touting their nForce 4 boards as "Vista Ready"... which is completely untrue. Today they changed the verbiage to "Vista Capable" which is softer, but still BS.

http://www.nvidia.com/page/nforce4_family.html

Don't tell me nVidia didn't have *years* to prepare for launch. Their public RC1 and RC2 drivers never even made it close to a stable state.

I mean what does this: "for false advertising by not providing stable working drivers for Vista." really mean? The drivers I downloaded are "stable" and "working". Of course I'm not one to drop ~$600 for a new piece of frivolous hardware every 6 months, and even if I were, I wouldn't expect the first coming together of new hardware, new OS and new drivers to be perfect. Be grateful there are drivers for anything but 8800's. They could have gone the Creative route and put everything under $70 on the "No development planned" list.

I guess I can see how some might be miffed that the drivers aren't perfect, but a lawsuit? Are you serious? Were you maimed by these drivers? Are you going to need to show us on the doll where nVidia touched you?

This is exactly my problem. I spent $620 on a Geforce 8800 GTX on Newegg last week and I have still be unable to get it to work in Vista. Their drivers BSOD on install and again on startup. I have to boot to safe mode and remove them. Yes, I've tried it many times and only on clean installs. Yes, I disabled my overclock. Yes, I'm sure the hardware is fine, its all brand new and it's been thoroughly put through the motions. See my thread on the official Nvidia forums. Everyone who is having this problem is up the creek without a paddle because Nvidia has no way of submitting bug reports (that part of their site is under construction), and there's not so much as a support phone number. They tell you to contact the manufacturer of your card, Foxconn in my case. I contacted Foxconn and they said it was a driver problem (which it is) and they couldn't help me. So I'm SOL and my new $620 card is worthless when used in conjunction with my $250 eVGA 680i mobo and $240 pair of 1GB Corsair PC2-6400 sticks and my $220 Core 2 Duo e6400 and my $400 "Ultimate" operating system. Yep. I feel great about my purchase(s).

"Also, while I would imagine that nVidia has a large staff of developers writing device drivers for their various bits and blogs of silicon, I would imagine the size of that staff is finite and that nVidia has to prioritize their work based on hard business decisions, such as the number of customers using a particular product with a particular operating system. Was it wrong of nVidia to focus their driver development efforts on satisfying the needs of the largest percentage of their installed base? Or should they have focused their efforts on their newest customers and satisfy the needs of thousands or tens of thousands instead of tens of millions?"

IANAL, but I think this is entirely irrelevant to the current discussion. Nvidia advertised the Geforce 8 series as "the first to support DirectX 10". Vista is the only DirectX 10 capable operating system. If a user purchased a Geforce 8 product, expecting full support under Windows Vista, the first DirectX 10 OS, then that user conceivably has a false advertising claim. Their argument would be that Nvidia made claims about their new part, then failed to back up those claims with a fully functional product. If the level of DirectX 10 support Nvidia claimed was not reasonably attainable given their software engineering capabilities, then they really should not have made the claims in the first place.

"Given that Microsoft Windows Vista is a brand new operating system in many respects, such as introducing a completely new video device driver model, and that, likewise, the 8800 series represents nVidia's own most complex product to date and so far has only a small market penetration, why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?"

Because Nvidia claimed that they do support those features, and not that they will support those features. If you're a customer who bought an 8800 specifically for its advertised level of Vista support, then it would be both surprising and alarming indeed.

Yes, yes, we all know what happened. The mouths of Nvidia's marketers wrote a check that the collective asses of Nvidia's engineers could not hope to cash. While on a personal level you or I may sumpathize with the company, particularily with its beleaguered engineering team, on a legal level all of these excuses mean exactly nothing. At the same time, you and I may feel that the folks who were actually foolish enough to buy the first of anything, let alone two firsts (first DX10 card and first DX10 OS), deserve the full measure of the early adopter's curse they're suffering through now. But again, from a legal standpoint I don't think that has any bearing.

Hello,

As an American, I have become somewhat desensitized to the various class action suits which seem to have become water and fodder for the legal industry, but this strikes me as being just sad.

Today is February 2, 2007 and Microsoft publicly released the consumer-oriented versions of Microsoft Windows Vista (the Home and Ultimate Editions) on January 30th, just three days ago. I participated in the testing of Windows Vista and installed the RTW version (Build 6000) on my primary desktop and laptop computers when it became available in November of last year. During testing, nVidia was good--not stellar, but not bad--about providing device drivers, and any problems I experienced during my testing with nVidia 6800GT and 7900GT-chipset based cards generally disappeared as new builds of the operating system and device drivers became available.

Right now, there is a huge installed base of nVidia GPUs out there (5200 and up are officially supported according to this) which people are using with Windows Vista and I am sure the percentage of those users with 8800-series GPUs out there hovers around a single percentage point or two.

Given that Microsoft Windows Vista is a brand new operating system in many respects, such as introducing a completely new video device driver model, and that, likewise, the 8800 series represents nVidia's own most complex product to date and so far has only a small market penetration, why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?

Also, while I would imagine that nVidia has a large staff of developers writing device drivers for their various bits and blogs of silicon, I would imagine the size of that staff is finite and that nVidia has to prioritize their work based on hard business decisions, such as the number of customers using a particular product with a particular operating system. Was it wrong of nVidia to focus their driver development efforts on satisfying the needs of the largest percentage of their installed base? Or should they have focused their efforts on their newest customers and satisfy the needs of thousands or tens of thousands instead of tens of millions?

What I do know is that, generally-speaking, nVidia has historically done a good job of providing decent support for their products and nothing I have seen or read in TFA has changed my opinion. Frankly, the number of nVidia owners who have 8800-series GPUs is a small majority. While these early adopters have paid a premium for their latest-and-greatest video cards and do deserve to be treated with respect by nVidia, I suspect that right now nVidia's engineers are working very hard on device drivers with support all the new features of their video cards and will probably have them available in a few days or a week or two.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky

Many people and I noticed the newer drivers after 8x.xx series are worse and buggier (can't use the older drivers with my EVGA GeForce 7950 GT KO card). First, they made that new control panel like ATI/AMD did. Everyone seems to hate it. I also hated it. Who knows when the old control panel will be gone since ATI/AMD removed its old one after a few versions.

Secondly with TV out, the newer drivers seem to have problems with full screen overlays. Also, NVIDIA drop TV out support in their 8800 cards! I am not the only one either since many owners (long thread) have this problem.

It looks like NVIDIA is getting sloppy in its software area now. I had respect more than ATI, but it is getting smaller and there are no other video card companies to go. :( Maybe Intel can be a third competitor, but they need to do well with the gaming area. Come on, NVIDIA. Get your stuff together!

I went to this page http://www.nvidia.com/object/7_series_techspecs.ht ml for my video card and it says:

Built for Microsoft® Windows Vista(TM)

* Third-generation GPU architecture built for Windows Vista
* Delivers best possible experience when running Windows Vista 3D graphical user interface
* New OS supported by renowned NVIDIA® Unified Driver Architecture (UDA) for maximum stability and reliability
* NVIDIA® PureVideo(TM) technology delivers high-quality VMR pipeline for best-in-class video for Windows Vista

Now, if I purchased this card to run on my new Vista machine, I would be pretty upset when it didn't work right. Wouldn't you?

"-Security's a problem? Let's create something that will let us blame the user. (UAC)"

Yeah! That's slashdot's job.

"-Games going to other OSs are a problem? Let's rewrite an incompatable DX10."

Well it's certainly not going to Linux or MacOSX. You must be thinking consoles. No DX was rewritten because GPU architecture is changing. No more dedicated pixel, and vertex pipelines. Now you just have more general units that can do pixel, vertex, and physics.

"-Third party drivers for video crads are crashing our driver model? Let's just gimp the third parties so that they can't and do it ourselves. (Bonus for gimping OpenGL.)"

Most people use the OpenGL that their video card maker provides.

"-GUI/useability is a problem? Let's just slice and dice some Linux and OS X elements."

Uh, huh.

XP's driver support was much better than Vista, that's certainly true. This is probably because Vista has a new driver model, and XP was basically Windows 2000 Plus, which meant that the drivers were essentially the same. Therefore drivers for Vista are taking a while to appear in the wild, and upgrading on existing hardware is currently a bit of crapshoot. My recommendation to friends and coworkers is not to upgrade to Vista at all on their existing hardware at all - instead wait for their next hardware refresh when they can be assured (well, more likely at least) to have Vista-compatible hardware.

For enthusiasts and box builders, sites like Tech Report have useful articles like their Vista System Guide that includes notes on Vista support for various pieces of hardware in both 32 and 64 bit flavors. Interestingly the current video card king, the GeForce 8800, only has preliminary support for Vista. Updates are no doubt in the pipeline, but it's good info to know before going shopping.

I'm wondering why NVIDIA hasn't jumped into this market. Isn't that exactly what modern GPUs do?

There's been something fishy going on at nVidia for a while.

One is nVidia's policy that *they* don't support nVidia techology; the OEMs do. They tell you if you have problems to contact your OEM. Now Apple is a big company and could conceivably do this, but many nVidia cards are made by small OEMs who slap electronics on a board and sell it. Are they going to help you with a crashing nVidia driver. And when you follow the link on the nVidia to their OEM "support partners", this is what you get:

http://www.nvidia.com/page/partner_support.html "Page not found"

nVidia has gone so far to shut down the feedback page on their website: It says "This module is still under construction." You really believe nobody at nVidia knows how to make a web feedback page?

There's a long running bug in nVidia drivers known as the nv4_disp bug. You'll be typing away on your PC, then suddenly your monitor goes blank. A few seconds later, your PC power down. This was happening to me and I though it was some perculiarity with my PC. It turns out, this is affecting a lot of people, and it has been around for many years. nVidia know about it (they mention it in passing on one of their forums), but haven't fixed it. Windows BSOD diagnoses it as an infinite loop "device driver programming error." Independently some skilled owners worked out it was a timing problem with how nVidia writes to an I/O register. If you're lucky this bug will hit you only once a week. If you're unlucky, several times a day. THIS HAS BEEN AROUND FOR YEARS, yet nVidia won't fix this damned thing!

Want to see how widespread the problem is? Google for nv4_disp. The owner of this web page says he's amazed how many hits this page gets, and theorises a lot of people are affected:

http://s13.invisionfree.com/nv4_disp/index.php?sho wtopic=10
http://byronmiller.typepad.com/byronmiller/2005/10 /stupid_windows_.html
http://www.computing.net/drivers/wwwboard/forum/49 55.html
http://www.christopherjason.com/articles/nvidia-nv 4disp-problem/
http://www.ntcompatible.com/thread27150-1.html
http://www.daniweb.com/techtalkforums/thread18930. html

The most frustating thing is that nVidia do everything they can to put you off. A "under construcion" feedback page. The fob-off to their partners, with a support page that doesn't even exist. Ignored e-mail. Ignored forum questions.

One solution is of course to buy an ATI card, but if you're paid hundreds of bucks for an nVidia card, what do you do? Does anyone know how we can make nVidia fix this damned thing?

The video card was standard in his machine. In other words... it was supplied by Apple. The drivers he is using are from Apple. Nvidia doesn't even offer Mac drivers on their site.