NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

[dangel]

which drivers are your using and have you ever used a driver cleaner before?

[[GSV]Trig]

Got 2 laptops here, both identical, one crashes with a driver failure about 15/20 times a day yet both are running the same version drivers..

[kalniel]

Er, yes, and that they were having serious issuess (and complaining about it). Nvidia had/has a duty to those who buy their products (whether low, or high end), to do their utmost to supply a product that works [the way they (Nvidia) describe it to wotk.]

All companies do - just because your product is more successful does not mean you have to as a consequence provide 3 times better quality product than the nearest opposition. But if your assessment criteria is purely based on number of complaints rather than proportion it will always look unfair on the more popular item. Exactly the same thing happens with gaming titles (if you read the forums you'd think that Oblivion was the worst game in existence by the number of complaints, but it's by far the most polished game Bethsoft have ever produced) and for Microsoft and so on.

What I don't like about nvidia drivers are the problems they have supporting games from different generations with the same set of drivers. I can't really blame them, because it's not in the market's interest for me to be playing 6 year old games on new hardware, but Ati had been better for me in that respect. Until recently. I'm now beginning to see similar things with Ati drivers, to a lesser extent, but who knows?

I think the only conclusion we can draw from this is that drivers suck, infact, the whole PC model of allowing frankenstein hardware and software sucks. But it's also what made the PC in the first place.

[chrestomanci]

Unsurprisingly The Register has picked up this story.

What is interesting is that one of the
comments on the story passes on a rumour that the reason is that Microsoft refused to provide nVidia and ATI with a special version of windows that would allow the normally protected graphics drivers to be debugged. (Rember that in order to protect the DRM on Hi-Def moves, Graphics drivers run in a protected space so that you can't take screenshots, divert decoded output to a non HDCP protected output device or run a debugger than might subvert the DRM.)

This rings true to me. I spent a year or so working for a small GPU card designer (not nVidia or ATI) back in 2005, and saw a number of internal documents about Direct X 10, and the Vista driver model, especially the DRM. I don't recall any mention of a special version of Vista that would allow debugging. Of course it is possible that it existed but was locked down so tight that only those who needed to know ever heard about it, but considering how open the company was about other things, I would have thought I would have heard a whisper about it if such a version of windows exists. We know that the Microsoft DRM in Vista is ruled by paranoia, so it would not surprise me if they refused to supply an unprotected version of Visa for fear that it might leak, and insisted that the graphics card vendors develop their driver using tracing only.

[Agent]

Unsurprisingly The Register has picked up this story.

What is interesting is that one of the
comments on the story passes on a rumour that the reason is that Microsoft refused to provide nVidia and ATI with a special version of windows that would allow the normally protected graphics drivers to be debugged. (Rember that in order to protect the DRM on Hi-Def moves, Graphics drivers run in a protected space so that you can't take screenshots, divert decoded output to a non HDCP protected output device or run a debugger than might subvert the DRM.)

This rings true to me. I spent a year or so working for a small GPU card designer (not nVidia or ATI) back in 2005, and saw a number of internal documents about Direct X 10, and the Vista driver model, especially the DRM. I don't recall any mention of a special version of Vista that would allow debugging. Of course it is possible that it existed but was locked down so tight that only those who needed to know ever heard about it, but considering how open the company was about other things, I would have thought I would have heard a whisper about it if such a version of windows exists. We know that the Microsoft DRM in Vista is ruled by paranoia, so it would not surprise me if they refused to supply an unprotected version of Visa for fear that it might leak, and insisted that the graphics card vendors develop their driver using tracing only.

If that was the case, its a real shame NV and ATi/AMD didn't get together for once and say "No debug tools, no drivers for Vista".
They really need to stand up to MS sometimes.

[No.72]

This was nVidia probably saying ha to Microsoft for te joke that DX10 is.

[dangel]

This was nVidia probably saying ha to Microsoft for te joke that DX10 is.

In what way is it a joke? I rather like the design of it (as compared to DX9)!