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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
I really hope there's some way I can use those same drivers under linux!
Oh....wait.
There are shills on slashdot. Apparently, I'm one of them.
The linux drivers for nvidia suck too, nvidia clearly take a long time to get up to speed on new operating systems, it's one reason I no longer use them. Having said that, they're pretty damn solid, so its most likely becuase vistas so mucked up when it comes to drivers.
What about the other 62.2%? ATI. ;)
Quit jabbering on the phone while driving. You are not that important.
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.
This is descending below lawsuit territory, I'm starting to think that the whole PC hardware industry should be taken out back and shot. 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.
"The Wow Starts, oh around 2009 if you'll just let us fix this, upgrade that and force you to buy some new stuff" Should have been the tagline for Vista.
If he's the Walrus then can I be a penguin please?
ATI was 9%
You can download Windows DDK (Driver Development Kit) for free. It's pretty good but doesn't play nice with Visual Studio IDE.
You must pay for testing and signing your drivers, I think.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
Parent links to shock site - do not click. This is much more amusing, if you want to click on something ;)
Is crushing a suspect's child's testicles illegal?
John Yoo: "No, [if] the President thinks he needs to do that."
Drivers in the kernel tend to work really well... As do the default open source drivers present in Xorg...
Nvidia drivers cause crashes occasionally, but ATI's drivers are really terrible and cause all kinds of problems.
It seems primarily to be closed source components that cause problems on linux, i used to have big stability problems with netscape (consuming all my ram and lagging the rest of the machine) and issues with vmware (not so much crashes, more leaving the keyboard in an unusable state).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Nvidia have a shamefully lax attitude to the stability of their drivers even under XP. Try searching google for NV4Disp.dll and you'll see that there is an issue that still causes BSOD's years after it was first reported, ironically the latest drivers only make the issue worse. This latest news will only make sure that my next card will not be from Nvidia.
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.
Well if NVidia is the only one with MAJOR driver problems....lets look at the math. 80% of the drivers work and they were built with the DDK while 20% (including NVidia's drivers) do not work and they were built with the DDK. I would think the 20% did not write their drivers correctly.
I smoked pot once. But I DID NOT inhale. Will you hire me?
Did MS certify they drivers? If so, it's still _their_ fault
Maybe MS could contribute some developers to Nouveau project and then insert hooks into it for their specific kernel?
839*929
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.
This is why i use my computer without graphics card. Nor screen. I am guided purely by instinct.
What's comical for Microsoft is that they would go and change the driver models for everyone for their new OS, and then blamed the resultant bugfest from the imposed change over on all of its business partners. Way to go Microsoft! You guys are a bunch of class acts!
This is my sig.
Since apparently you can have a class action lawsuit for drivers not working, lets open up the floodgates and punish the manufacturers for not having compatible software! And why stop at video drivers? Lets sue all the makers of legacy hardware. And wifi hardware. Have an OLD 5 1/4 floppy? Sue! Have one of those old HP video-now PCMCIA cards? Sue! Sue sue sue!!!
Most of these driver incompatibilities were actually caused because microsoft changed the driver structure at the last minute which basically shot a lot of the manufacturers in the foot at the starting line. If this class action lawsuit goes through... how likely do you think NVidia and ATI are going to be to jump on the bandwagon for Windows 7? I mean, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I can't imagine being the victim of a multimillion dollar class action lawsuit because of microsoft's incompetance is going to make them the best buddies. Then again, I wonder if nvidia and ati have the right to sue microsoft in response should this current class action lawsuit go through? They developed to the specs microsoft had given them, so if microsoft changed those specs at the last minute... seems kind of uncool to me.
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.
NVIDIA vs ATI drivers - I don't really care.
"It worked for me" - I don't really care.
Statistics on the cause of crashes - I don't really care.
Anybody running unsigned drivers and experiencing crashes - I don't really care
Hang on. Let me explain.
The fact that you can STILL crash a Windows machine with a dodgy driver - that I care about. I thought everything was supposed to be userspace. I thought the error-handling was supposed to be better. I thought that Windows was supposed to be more stable and secure. I thought people who were using signed drivers were supposed to be "approved" and relatively crash-free.
Unsigned drivers? You can't support that no matter who you are, unless you're confident they are PURE userspace - they could be doing anything (like the 3DFX drivers that used to open access to all sorts of things it shouldn't in order for a primitive user-space part to actual drive the hardware). That's why you have to click that "CONTINUE Anyway" button with the dire warning. That's the Windows equivalent of kernel tainting. Once you've done that, nobody cares. The fact that most XP drivers are still using uncertified drivers is a bit of a problem but I can understand the reasons why. But you can't blame MS for crashes in uncertified drivers under XP. I thought Vista was supposed to be different, though.
If a certified driver is crashing that often, then you have an entirely different matter. The certification effectively becomes worthless. Nobody trusts it. Therefore every driver manufacturer ignores certification and just tells users to click "Continue". Then you will have nothing BUT uncertified drivers. Catch-22.
Blue screens should not happen. They certainly shouldn't happen often enough that people have coined the term "blue-screen" or BSOD to mean a crash. When they DO happen, when the driver goes absolutely nuts and starts stomping memory, aren't things like DEP and the user-space driver model supposed to STOP that happening and recover in some half-decent fashion? Or shouldn't the machine at least what the cause was and provide the user with some hint of what went wrong (i.e. "You installed an uncertified driver. Tough.").
Let's compare for a second - Linux kernels crash too. They crash much more often if third-party drivers are installed and nobody really cares about that except the third-party and their users. When they do crash, there's not much you can do but most of the time you'll get all sorts of debugging information and usually you can carry on. You might lose X, which may or may not load up again - I have a laptop that likes to crash X if I run more than one copy of Xine at a time but the worst that happens is X dies and restarts and then carries on working for hours/days/weeks as if nothing had happened (and yes, I need to update the kernel/X on that machine!) but things keep on working as best they can. You can do pretty much what you like in terms of software but the worst that'll happen if you're not actually loading a kernel module or patching a kernel or playing with kernel-level features is a software crash and be chucked back to the command-line. Sometimes you might even end up taking out X, like my example above.
You can rip out the harddrive and *make* the kernel crash but most of the time things will carry on, just without the component you ripped out (i.e. the IDE layer may die, but it'll still keep running as best it can without it). Even when Linux comes to a complete halt and freezes, you have debugging information and logs with which to narrow down the cause yourself, without needing to consult Linus himself.
When Windows crashes (even with certified drivers and clean installs), there's bugger all to go on. Half the time the event log doesn't show anything at all. The second you see a blue screen, the computer is down and there's little arguing. There's zero information to go on. You have no idea what caused the crash at all because usually all you get is a generic STOP error and a
So let me get this straight: When X Crashes you lose your current session, right? Which means that OOo document you were working on just went "poof" - your media player shuts down, along with all your other apps that launch within the context of the X session.
Now, your uber OS may have stayed "on" in that it could reload all that crap without having to spend 20 seconds rebooting, but for all intents and purposes from a user perspective, your whole OS just freaking crashed.
From Wikipedia:
Source article
This is the only way the "trusted path" will work and it would be convenient for Microsoft if people and institutions did not realize that this is an unacceptable way of doing things.
No calls now, I'm
Don't the ATI/nVidia Omega drivers work in Vista? Assuming they do, it seems most of the crashes were due to people being ill informed or giving up rather than the fault of either manufacturer. Personally, I would place blame on Microsoft before any manufacturer as I am sure they have *something* to do with the driver design process and making sure nVidia and ATI are properly informed. The ultimate blame, of course, rests on the users for daring to install a Microsoft product before SP2... http://www.omegadrivers.net/
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/eb1936c0-e19c-4a17-a1a8-39292e4929a41033.mspx?mfr=true
Depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.
Windows NT 3.51 may have been the most stable version of Windows in history. I think it was the one on which Microsoft spent the most time and money on testing and on a fairly massive scale went out and helped hardware and driver people with their testing (providing labs with a large variety of configurations etc.). They were trying to solidify the Windows base within businesses, and convince businesses that Windows was no longer a toy (i.e. gaming) operating system only. The goal, among other things was to get people off of OS/2, older versions of Windows (93 and WFW).
The program was a great success. Not only did large parts of the federal government switch, I even made the switch on my home machines. Unless you were a gamer (in which case you would have still been running 95 or then 98) you could have experienced a relatively unbloated and crash-free Windows experience. It was the lat time I tried running Windows for days on end without regular restorative reboots.
As the link states:In point of fact, video drivers could "fail" prior to 4.0 and only cause minor screen corruption or glitches, or in fact be asymptomatic. After 4.0 though, the same failure might cause a system crash, or might cause other programs to appear to crash, or might cause disk I/O buffers to contain garbage that would subsequently be written out to disk and cause crashes hours later, not to mention you wondering why your spreadsheets were deteriorating over time.
I don't remember Microsoft going out and asking video vendors if they thought this was all a good idea. In fact the element of surprise was very important to MS for some reason on the 4.0 announcement... no pre-announcement of features being added or removed as there were for years leading up to Vista. They certainly didn't ask me. I left the meeting telling my colleagues taht this was nuts. And I don't think they gave either vendors or users much time to adjust to the changes as I went from thinking that Windows had finally arrived to wishing I had stayed with OS/2.
From what I read, MS no longer does the extensive testing they did for 3.51, and in fact they make driver and hardware makers pay them for any help they get in order to be "certified". Having won the game of becoming THE business operating system, MS said "screw you" to the partners that helped them get there. Typical.
MS engineers bragged about being geniuses during the 4.0 product roll-out for moving drivers to kernel space, but the move was necessary due to GUI bloat that was added for that release. Subsequent bloat of that nature has made each subsequent version of Windows seem less snappy and take up more memory, and no doubt the next product roll-out after 4.0 (at which point I had stopped attending) I'm sure the MS engineers bragged about being geniuses for moving drivers back into user-mode for reliability reasons. Both moves might have cause significant adjustments to be made by driver makers on short notice depending, for example, on whether they were relying on memory protection and changing the nature of their context switches.
If you don't blame Microsoft for some of these driver problems you either work there, or haven't been paying attention for long enough.
All of your applications probably still crashed.
These statistics were calculated using Excel.
Have gnu, will travel.
I have used numerous nVidia cards with many games and have never seen an nVidia driver crash on me, in Windows or Linux.
Maybe some of these crashes are caused by the flaky motherboards and memory that the drivers run on, or power supplies, and it's just that code in those drivers is what pushes the hardware to the max and makes it crash.
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Actually Microsoft had been talking to the graphics IHVs about the new Longhorn "Advanced Driver Model" as early as spring 2005. Both ATI and nVidia had representatives (i.e., developers) working closely with Redmond during that time. The Longhorn/Vista display model became known as "WDDM" and was more or less locked down, from what I understand, by late 2005. By the time of WinHEC 2006 (April), they were already talking about WDDM 2.0, as you can see from this presentation. If you take a look at the slide deck, ATI's Tim Kelley actually delivered part of the presentation on WDDM 2.0.
Frankly, I don't think nVidia invested enough energy in making high-quality Vista drivers in time for launch. They had approximately a full year of Betas, the same time that ATI and Intel had. The Vista Beta and RC programs had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, for which Microsoft collected crash dump data (which is the same type of data mentioned in this article, collected BEFORE launch). Yet even with this time, and the user crash dump reports, clearly by launch in January 2007 nVidia still wasn't ready with robust drivers.
The evidence here really does point at nVidia, no matter how much you want it to point at Microsoft.
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.
What's that "oldid" part of that URL? I don't see that in most wikipedia links I follow... you wouldn't be trying to pull a fast one by simply noting that Wikipedia in the past has been defaced (and quickly fixed, a whole 15 minutes it was up), yet trot it out as an operational fact, would you? Because that would be dishonest, and I wouldn't think an AC would be dishonest.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
One can always count on any thread on /. about Windows Vista to generate posts full of verve, passion, and technical ignorance. So far the responses have included long rants about NVIDIA's (and other video vendor's) policy towards Linux drivers, the usual anti-Vista FUD from posters who are proud of their lack of actual experience with the OS, and even the old "DRM sux" chestnut.
XPDM (the current nomenclature for the Windows Driver Model for Windows XP video) was the end-point of a decade of side-by-side work between the DirectX graphics technology (DirectDraw/Direct3D) and the core Graphics Device Interface (GDI). It worked, but only when the OS itself never used 3D features at all. In fact, 3D applications were extremely limited in their ability to multi-task the GPU, and writing XPDM drivers had become extremely complex. After years of experience writing & optimizing drivers for Direct3D9, it was obvious that the bottlenecks for future performance growth were in the driver stack itself. Many years of work lead to the development of WDDM (the nomenclature for the Windows Display Driver Model for Windows Vista video) to address GPU-sharing, 'small-batch' performance overhead, and to unify the GDI/Direct3D APIs to simplify driver development.
Drivers have always been a major source of crash reports. This is fairly obvious for any OS that has a 3rd party plug-in model: MSFT can test the OS with the drivers it ships with, but it cannot test every possible combination of hardware in the market. Windows Error Reporting (aka WATSON) provides numerous data points that help MSFT find these problems, and video drivers crashing in kernel-mode remains a key source of crashes on XPDM. Part of this comes from the complexity of supporting both GDI and Direct3D DDI at the same time, but a lot of it comes from the problem space inherent in programmable shader GPUs. XPDM drivers include shader compilers, and these code bases are like most compilers for non-trivial cases: difficult to get right 100% of the time. Therefore, one of the design features of WDDM was segregating the video driver into a kernel-mode piece and a user-mode piece, so that crashes in complex shader compilers would result in user-mode applications crashes, not BSOD. I note that the original article cited in this thread doesn't state if these are application crashes or BSOD crashes. WDDM didn't just change for the sake of change, but to invest in the needs of the next 5-10 years of video graphics performance, stability, and security.
While MSFT, the hardware vendors, and end-users would all like to have seen 100% rock-solid WDDM drivers and full performance optimizations across Direct3D9 (XP-era games), Direct3D9Ex (the new Windows Vista Shell), and Direct3D 10 the day Windows Vista shipped, the work involved was immense and the timing very tight. AMD/ATI & NVIDIA were developing major revs of their hardware which market realities demanded worked well on XP (and all the benchmarks at the time would judge them on XPDM), at the same time they were supporting an entirely new driver model and new API, had to support both 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x64 native kernel-mode drivers to get full coverage for the transition to 64-bit mandated by the Windows driver logo programs, and deal with the technical challenges 512 MB+ VRAMs created for SLI/Crossfire and PC BIOS compatibility. All that while investing in their own initiatives (CUDA, OpenGL, Linux, etc.) and dealing with things like the AMD / ATI merger.
The transition from XPDM to WDDM is no more messy than the transition from Windows 9x/ME was to NT/2000. There are a lot of moving pieces, a lot of actors to coordinate, and a great deal of technical challenges to overcome and new optimization expertise to develop. As with the previous transitions, it took a year or so to get the kinks worked out, and today the latest WDDM drivers are in pretty good shape overall.
Now back to your regularly scheduled Schadenfreude...
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