Slashdot Mirror
NVIDIA's Drivers Caused 28.8% Of Vista Crashes In 2007
PaisteUser tips us to an Ars Technica report discussing how 28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers. The information comes out of the 158 pages of Microsoft emails that were handed over at the request of a judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit. NVIDIA has already faced a class-action lawsuit over the drivers. From Ars Technica:
"NVIDIA had significant problems when it came time to transition its shiny, new G80 architecture from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The company's first G80-compatible Vista driver ended up being delayed from December to the end of January, and even then was available only as a beta download. In this case, full compatibility and stability did not come quickly, and the Internet is scattered with reports detailing graphics driver issues when using G80 processors for the entirely of 2007. There was always a question, however, of whether or not the problems were really that bad, or if reporting bias was painting a more negative picture of the current situation than what was actually occurring."
Just sayin
Well, this wouldn't be the first time Nvidia drivers are responsible for instability.
I remember when the first nForce3 drivers came out that had those IDE problems. And the continuing problem with the SW drivers. Man, I thought something was seriously wrong with my new rig. Nope, just the drivers....
Do not downmod posts "overrated" simply because you disagree with them.
You don't think it's more likely that the other 62% were just... caused by Vista?
I know you say that in jest, but the article states that ATI have 9.3% of the problems. It stands to reason that it is representative of their market share.
The part that seems to have been missed is the fact that Microsoft had 17.9% of the crashes related to their own drivers. IMO this is much more significant and interesting than Nvidia beta drivers crashing and should be the real news here.
Signature v3.0, now with 42% less memory usage.
28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers
Well then it's a good thing their driver support is so crappy with Linux!
Oh wait...
More seriously, I rag on Nvidea for poor Linux support, and this is more of a chance to bash them, but their drivers work fine under XP. If Microsoft provided better documentation of their APIs, as the EU has been demanding, perhaps writing drivers wouldn't be such a pain in the ass?
I also wonder why closed source vendors don't open their code. They don't have to release it under the GPL, they can reatain all their copyrights, just publish the source. How could it hurt them? They retain copyrights and presumably patents so it's not like anyone could copy them.
Is closed source closed so that nobody will realise just how abysmally shitty their kludges are?
If your OS crashes, your OS is crap. Microsoft, fix your OS and publish the code. Nvidea, fix your shitty drivers and open the code. Don't give up any rights, just open it.
I'd like to see copyright law changed so that executables can't be copyrighted unless the source is also provided. How can IBM tell what parts of their code they stole from SCO? Of course the answer was "none". Time to reboot copyright law!
-mcgrew
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I tried Vista on two machines running ATI cards- a desktop and laptop. They crashed an average of 2-3 times a day (BSOD). In all cases- Microsoft blamed the ATI video drivers, which I kept updated from ATI and Microsoft's own updates. I got fed up with it after a month.
I dropped Windows completely and went with Ubuntu Linux. It has issues with video cards too, but aside from not being able to enable some eye-candy- it almost never crashes. (Usually the only time it does is when I try to tweak video settings or try new drivers.)
Video card drivers are probably the number one problem with computers right now, in ANY operating system. It wouldn't surprise me if they are responsible for a lot of game console crashes too.
Did MS certify they drivers? If so, it's still _their_ fault
We're a dell hardware shop. We buy on a 4 year cycle, every machine gets replaced every 4 years with the latest latitude line shipping model of laptop. In this past few cycles they've been NVidia based. They all have 2 gigs of ram, sata hard drives, dual core higher end processors and of course, NVidia Mobile chipsets. So, all 800 people at my company with nvidia chipsets cannot deploy vista until a) the drivers are fixed. b) the hardware cycle comes up in 4 years. All the people getting new machines right now are perfectly happy because the hardware is supported, but just those purchased 6 months ago and before (D820's) are not capable of running vista with dual monitors without gambling on whether or not they will be alive after a weekend on screensaver.
Speak for yourself.
> They supported MS in the release of an OS with crap under-powered hardware with smiles and big adverts, in full knowledge that these
> systems would never work or just were not ready for Vista.
I can assure you, having worked in a place which designs cards and writes drivers for Windows, that the release of a new Microsoft OS is not met with whoops and `alrights` etc. It marks the start of another tedious cycle of testing, fixing and dealing with customer problems. People want to be able to plug in a card and have it `just work` and there's absolutely nothing in Vista* which makes any amount of hassle
worth it.
*I kept hearing about Aero. Am I missing something, or are the new features which require powerful hardware and plenty of ram limited to just the pseudo-3d task manager, and semi-opaque frosted-glass around the borders of active windows? That's it? Why can't this be done adequately using low-powered CPUs? Are Microsoft's coders that inept?
...or are the Vista users on here beginning to sound almost as rabidly fanboi-ish as the Apple ones?
When a third party is writing the drivers, you don't want them to have access to anything proprietary and so the interfaces need to be very thoroughly documented because the external team isn't allowed to have access to the implementation details at all. A lot of the early XFree86 accelerated drivers were developed in this way and, at the time, were a lot more stable than their Windows counterparts, as were the early Radeon drivers written by the open source community.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Now if only they could make their XP drivers suck less.
They may be more stable to the user, but in terms of actually programming for them.. yikes. You look at them funny and you lose your whole opengl context or start running a 1 frame/hour. Nvidia's drivers are much more likely to either a) work or b) tell you why they didn't.
ATI drivers don't even install without serious acrobatics. Therefore, the OS cannot report them as crashing, they never worked to begin with!
I have some weird problem with my 7900GT with Vista where it goes nuts if I plug in the supplemental power cable. Without it, the card at least outputs correct video, but it dials back performance if it can't draw enough current. When I plug in the power cable, it boots up fine, but when the nVidia drivers load, my screen goes nuts like it's not syncing properly or something.
My system still does this. New drivers, rolling back to old drivers will not fix the infinite loop crash that still occurs with these drivers. Its not only isolated to Vista, i dual boot Vista and XP and both crash with the same error, nv4disp.dll infinite loop error. Ive tried everything i could find to solve this and just gave up and reboot the system every other day to avoid the crash. Right now I can get 3 days of uptime max before it crashes, thats just with an idle desktop.
One observation. Microsoft hires a lot of "A" students in Computer Science. These people are those who tend to be better at school than at writing code. When I went to school, I observed that many of the best programmers were "C" students, because they spent all their time in the lab screwing around with their own code, and less time studying.
It is surprising how little has been discussed in this thread about the Vista DRM mechanism and especially the killswitch "features" for anything in software that might circumvent DRM policy.
(another reason to be grateful for slysoft... just wish they would develop a full-featured DRM-free media player that worked perfectly out of any output/input and supported any HD content and integrated AnyDVD HD and Clone DVD/Clone CD as needed. I would pay for it too!)
Too bad technical specifics have not been leaked via wikileaks, et al., regarding the Vista DRM mechanisms.
I have a sneaking suspicion is it a tremendously enhanced digital Rube Goldberg Device. (This is what I tell lay persons when asked about what is wrong with Windows Vista.)
ATI and Nvidia must have bulletproof NDAs from Microsoft and full knowledge of the Microsoft Vista DRM model for audio and video. How could they not and still write a working driver?
Ever since I read about Vista's deliberate prevention of hardware driver and 3rd-party DMA access and the concept of the OS-controlled Cache of all of the main system memory AND VIDEO CARD MEMORY, I knew this would be a COMPLETE NIGHTMARE for any hardware accelerated 3D, Video, and Audio.. and gaming too. Can you shoot yourself in both feet any more thoroughly before the race?
Time will tell if any disgruntled employees wanting to leak the DRM specs do so?
Personally, I am still pretty miffed that most the neat-o ATI x1800 AIW I/O features were specifically and intentionally disabled by design in Vista. (ATI Specifically stated this on their web site for the AIW before the AMD take over...might still be there) No thank You to Vista. This ability makes XP superior in my book.
In time, the truth will come out about the Vista DRM bulldozer and its path will lead broadly to Redmond.
In the end, virtually all questions will be answered by only one answer: MONEY.
About a year ago, my college had an alumni breakfast in Silicon Valley. One of my fellow alumni proudly exclaimed that he worked for NVidea writing drivers.
When asked about Vista, he told us how Microsoft was "sooo understanding" about letting them ship drivers before they were complete. I bit my tounge and decided to stay away from Vista.
No, I will not work for your startup