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Nvidia Faces Class Action Lawsuit Over Vista Drivers
Cocoshimmy writes "Nvidia is facing a class action lawsuit for false advertising by not providing stable working drivers for Vista. Nvidia has been accused of closing threads on Nvidia's forum and banning users that request a response from Nvidia, post that their Nvidia hardware does not work under Vista, post that Nvidia software does not work under Vista, post that Nvidia is guilty of false advertising, or threaten to sue Nvidia. Several disgruntled users have set up their own site for discussing their legal options."
I'd post first, but my monitor's on the fritz. Stupid new OS.
I'm sure someone can port it to Vista. Tell me again about how Windows has better hardware support than Linux.
http://www.mhall119.com
Considering Microsoft is still in the process of patching Vista, including a major patch issued just as Vista went out the door, can we really stick all the blame on Nvidia?
Maybe someone at Microsoft should work on porting the Linux nvidia drivers to Vista. The work well on Linux, so maybe the drivers can be "reverse engineered" to work with Vista.
It seems that for once, there's a major piece of computer hardware with better driver support for Linux than for Windows.
"They redundantly repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end ad infinitum" -- ibid.
While this class action seems to be about high-end graphics cards, which I have ever expectation that NVIDIA are working hard on drivers for, it's worth pointing out that they don't intend to support the NForce/2/3 motherboards with Windows Vista drivers.
Just upgraded a machine, network & sound works, but when I scroll in Firefox, I get choppy audio playback in Winamp; in the process of trying to figure out if it's Winamp at fault or the audio driver.
False advertising.
Nvidia claimed it would work, people spent time and money based on their promise.
Tort law is the ONLY avenue people have to defend themselves against the actions of a corporation.
It has nothing to do with entitlement.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I bought a nVidia card yesterday (after the Vista launch) to upgrade my aging 9800. There's a huge fucking sticker on the box saying 'Windows Vista Ready', so, I expect it to work with Vista. (It does, but I swear my ATi 9800 ran Aero slightly faster).
At least they got this one right. That's what you get for upgrading: huge hole in your wallet, crappy OS and nvidia forum mods poking fun at you...
I hope I didn't brain my damage.
While I understand why these people are upset, why do people always feel the need to sue? It's in Nvidia's best interest to keep their customers happy, and as such will probably be releasing drivers that DO work very soon. If they don't, these customers will just go to one of their competitors the next time they're in the market for a high end video card.
Let your money do the talking and stop helping lawyers make money on stuff like this.
You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life. --Winston Churchill
It's that new Vista DRM feature, brought to you by the fine people at Nvidia:
Doesn't Really Matter (DRM) technology ensures that if you have a complaint, you can't visit an Nvidia or Microsoft website to lodge it.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
This has nothing to do with that.
They had stable vista drivers out for their older cards for somettime. This is specifically to do with a brand new card that has such a different archetecture that they had to redo the driver from the ground up and seriously underestimated the time it would take.
Marketing went ahead and sold the hardware as "The first vista ready video card" (DX 10 whee), engineering was not ready. It really is borderline plausible that they could be gulty of false advertising.
Contrary to popular belief, coding is not all free blow-jobs and beer. Those things cost MONEY!
Must be your video card.
The problem I have with that in particular is that I bought an 8800 GTX months before Vista came out. I especifically bought it because it claimed that it was Vista Ready. Well, it's not, and my options are quite limited. I can't return it, and I don't really want to purchase another card after I already spent over $600 for this one. In my case, I can't "let my wallet do the talking."
Most Windows XP 32/64 and Vista 32 drivers for 3DFx Voodoo cards are partially done by backporting libglide3x and mesa3d from linux to windows (and thus also earned the privilege of being among the few graphic boards supported in XP64)
Although not actually Windows XP/Vista per se, the Linux USB stack has been also ported to ReactOS (opensource clone of Windows NT family) and Cromwell (opensource BIOS for XBox).
Therefore, some simple driver, with no 3D acceleration could be possibly done out of source available in linux.
(And if nVidia still doesn't fix the problem*, maybe some useful infos from the Nouveau project could be used to add the 3D functionnality. Having a complete opensource driver next to the commercial one isn't something unheard of in the Win32 world : Audigy sound cards have both official drivers from Creative and the kX project).
----
* : Isn't completly unlikely. Their main audience, from which they earn most money are game players. Given the fact that almost all current games run on Windows XP + DX9, they'ld better spend more money in improving the WinXP support, to have a higher position in tests to sell more to gamers, rather than spend the same money on Vista, and thus risking to loose customer due to better Catalyst. I won't be surprised if, appart for their made-for-DX10 flagship products and business oriented cards, progress of Vista drivers are as slow as for linux, until games start to appear that target Vist DX10.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Let's all go down to our local computer stores tomorrow, stand near the Microsoft Vista display and snigger quietly to ourselves whenever a Joe Average picks up a Vista box?
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Windows Vista is an absolute disaster! From an engineer's point of view, the system is not built for security and stability, its just patched up with holes left for the recording industries. If a virus was to take advantage of these holes, then I doubt anything could stop it. Combined with all the out-of-the-box DRM and restrictions, the system is a lot more complicated for no apparent reason. For the NVIDIA drivers to work properly in Vista, there is a LOT of work and possible debugging due to Vista's chaos. Don't blame NVIDIA for this, its Microsoft's fault for the whole DRM fiasco. Now NVIDIA and ATI have to comply. ATI already told the masses that Microsoft's idea is crap and customers would be paying for this big bucks. Microsoft are no longer the leader/monopolist they once were. If you have an issue, don't buy Vista (like most of us), and get REAL high performance, or switch to an even better OS. The choice is there, suing and wining gets you nowhere.
Beta Sucks
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
Dexter is a good dog.
Let's see...
_ cost.html):
Why would nvidia's drivers work with Windows 95/98/ME/NT/2000/XP, Linux (32 and 64 bit), Solaris and FreeBSD - but not with Vista?
Do you think that nvidia forgot how to code video drivers? No, that doesn't seem logical.
Well what is different between Vista and all of the others?
How about all the stupid Vista DRM features? You know, the ones that ATI was bitching about when they said (http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista
An ATI product manager responsible for producing the actual hardware says:
"These costs are passed on to the consumer"
"This cost is passed on to all consumers"
"This cost is passed on to purchasers of multimedia PC's"
"Costs are passed on to consumers"
"Costs are passed on to consumers, especially early adopters"
I'm sure that the lion's share of these costs are software related. More software cost means more code. More code means more opportunity for unexpected features (aka "bugs").
Don't blame nvidia. Blame Microsoft.
why is anyone alarmed (or even surprised) that WHQL-certified device drivers are not available yet which take advantage of all its features?
Because the manufacturer claimed that they were, and people made purchases based on that claim.
What would Lemmy do?
"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.
I just did what I swore I would never do. I had to purchase a replacement laptop for my stepson, but it was impossible to find a decent one (decently fast with 1G of RAM or greater) that came without Vista, and all but impossible to find any that didn't come with a microsoft OS. I walked into best buy after trying 5 or 6 stores - only one place would sell me an Ubuntu laptop and theirs was an average of $2K, way out of my budget! I called many places and drove around to a number of stores. Future shop had a big vista banner hung outside their store.
It was a totally ludicrous situation. When I went into best buy, the staff were playing about with the shiny new desktops trying to figure out how stuff worked. Customers were asking what games or legacy would run on the new OS, and the staff sort of shrugged. They obviously had this dropped on them and didn't have a clue either. So I bought the laptop with Vista ( the kid is a windows lover and whines that his favorite game du jour doesn't work under Linux)
So I get the damned thing home, and try to connect through my wireless home LAN. (Linksys WRT54GS running the latest firmware) Guess what? Can't reach beyond my local network - something about TCP scaling problems with the primary DNS server!!! I never had this much trouble with basic networking under SuSE, Ubuntu, or XP. I was even able to get the kids PS2 and PSP networked with less trouble than this!
There has to be some sort of laws put in place to ensure betas (and that is exactly what this is) are not being rammed down everybody's throat like this. The whole situation is utterly insane. I am going to be up half the night trying to get the damned piece of crap connected to the internet.
My rights don't need management.
I exchanged emails with nvidia PR man Ken Brown asking for an official response from nvidia about the Vista/nvidia DVD playback kludge with tv-out
basically, if you have TV-out enabled, like to watch a DVD on your HDTV over VIVO component cables, vista disables the dvd playback by breaking the overlay on any application/video stack. This, I confirmed, worked just fine on the same HDTV over VGA though.
Naturally, after thanking me for bringing the "issue" to their attention, Mr. Brown ignored my last email. Maybe now, Mr. Brown will take the time out of his busy day to respond.
we're waiting.
They're using their grammar skills there.
My Nvidia + Windows Vista experience has been essentially *perfect*.
;-)
I have two EVGA Nvidia 8800 GTX video cards with 768 megabytes of ram.
I purchased Windows Vista Ultimate at Midnight on Monday.
I installed the 64 bit version of Vista Wednesday morning (24 hours later) using beta drivers released by Nvidia earlier (found off of guru3d.com I believe).
I checked the Nvidia web site later that day and they had release drivers (one of my monitors was not being recognized for its full resolution capabilities with the beta drivers).
I downloaded and installed the release drivers from the Nvidia web site.
I have had no video problems at all. I am able to drive 3 monitors at once (two 30" 2560x1600 monitors and one rotated 1600x1200 monitor), play games at full 2560x1600 resolution with comparable screen rates as prior to Vista upgrade, use the nifty Aero Interface, etc.
I think if this goes to court, someone will ask - so when did Microsoft release Vista to the public? Ok, how long after that did you have to wait for your drivers? One day? Why are we here today?
Compared to time consuming frustration on getting all my other business applications running, the idea that someone is suing over nvidia drivers is comical to me. Too bad their web site is slashdotted as I would love to sign on there and call all of them morons. I wonder if they'll trim those posts.
I'm trying to think of any other product where you can buy it at time X, it suits your purpose and you're happy, then at time X+1 something changes, it no longer suits your purpose and that is somehow the manufacturer's fault. Honestly, if you bought your card to use with XP and it now doesn't work with Vista, don't you solely have the option of not using Vista? Or buying a new card?
Ok, I really don't agree with the people's arguments or the lawsuit, as for the most part, NVidia has delivered Vista drivers that are better than the XP drivers at this point.
However, the reason your argument is wrong, is when NVidia came out with the 7800 and other 7xxx series Geforce cards, their advertising SPECIFICALLY said that this generation of card was already Vista Ready and had Vista WDDM called LDDM drivers availble for them. However, as many people in the beta of Vista would know, NVidia DID NOT have Vista drivers even at that time period, and they didn't even start dropping stable non-debug drivers until this month, which is a long time from June of 2005 when they advertised their cards were ALREADY Vista Ready.
As for the whole lawsuit, I disagree with it completely, yes NVidia was late, but they DID get good drivers out by the time Vista released.
As for people on here discounting NVidia or Vista, please remember that Vista has a Video driver model that is different than is used in ANY OTHER OS. It supports things like GPU multi-tasking and system RAM smart-realtime sharing with GPU RAM, as well as the driver is no longer a kernel level driver and runs in User mode, in addition to several very technical differences.
The other problem with the argument of this lawsuit is the pure fact, that WindowsXP drivers work on Vista, just as they worked on WindowsXP. They will not get AERO/Glass or the features I mentioned above that are new to the WDDM in Vista, but they will perform EXACTLY like they did in XP.
This is not like NVidia has screwed over users in any way, although during the beta process I could have smacked the marketing deptment of NVidia for advertising WDDM Vista Ready for the 7xxx series of cards when this was simply not even close to being true. And in fact, ATI had the first and most stable drivers during the entire Vista Beta, even though ATI didn't release OpenGL support until this month as well for their drivers.
A month ago, our techs would have told gamers to skip Vista for a while, but with the drivers released this month from both ATI and NVidia at the 11th hour for the Vista release, things have dramatically changed.
Both companies have a few glitches with a few games, but for the most part the drivers are solid, and deliver better FPS on Vista even when running with Glass still on and even in a Window. You can also run with higher quality textures than you could in XP since the WDDM shares system RAM with the GPU intelligently, so turn up the High Quality Textures that your Video card couldn't handle before and enjoy the view.
Another thing to notice is that in Vista you can run multiple games at the same time without worry about running out of GPU RAM, and even with multiple games running do the Glass Flip 3D with all the games and applicaitons. And even in Flip 3D the games FPS only drops maybe 2-5fps, even though it and other games are running at the same time on the screen in flip 3D. This is impressive and shows that Vista can squeeze a lot of performance out of the hardware and games beyond what any other OS, including XP has been able to acheive.
Now most people won't be running multiple games, but if you want to run WoW or Oblivion or CoH in a Glassy Window while you have Vent or TeamSpeak open and your messenger and a movie playing, you can, and without losing framerates like you would have in XP or any other OS, because of how Vista handles the Memory and GPU multi-tasking with the WDDM in Vista.
So everyone out there ha-ha-ing Vista's Video, instead of laughing at things you don't understand, you should be taking notes on what MS has done right with Vista technically, some of it is impressive architectually, especially if you are an OS theorist/engineer.
I purchased Windows Vista Ultimate at Midnight on Monday. You need a life. Seriously.
They both just have to BOYCOTT drivers for Vista, they are not required by law or contract to make drivers.
They can just say, NO, until we can do it OUR WAY.
Vista will sell like ZERO sales.... MS will force NO DRM on FUIA.
So who else is the choice besides these two for good 3d? nothing, absolutely nothing, matrox? no not really...
They hold the cards, either make buggy drivers, and MSs DX10 vista scheme will die, or just dont support vista, due
to less than 50m install base marketing idealogy.
MS holds no power, their DX10 + DRM is useless with no supported 3d cards apart from intels chipsets which are crap.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
...the most obvious one:
Dangerous, Raging Monkeyboy
The view was horrible and the smell was even worse; Julie severely regretted becoming a proctologist.