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."

Comments

Certified

[fozzmeister]

Did MS certify they drivers? If so, it's still _their_ fault

Re:Huh?

[TheRaven64]

In my (somewhat limited) experience, the best drivers are those written by a third party. The more complex the hardware, the bigger the hardware and driver teams get. When you have a really complex bit of hardware, like a GPU, you have a huge team of hardware designers (who don't really understand software) and a huge team of driver developers (who don't really understand software). If they are both in house then you generally have pretty poor documentation because both teams have access to the other's work, but not the expertise to understand it fully. The hardware guys all think that the software team can get most of what they need from the HDL, and just fill in the gaps with their documentation.

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.