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Thread: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

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    NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    A Microsoft-compiled list of driver-related crashes in Windows Vista during 2007 reveals that NVIDIA accounts for nearly 29 percent of all such crashes.
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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    From the number of posts on this (and other) forum/s, it doesn't really come as any supprise that the biggest culprit was Nvidia (it took them long enough to release any drivers, let alone one that works.
    Last edited by vinnyT; 27-03-2008 at 02:42 PM.

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    No kidding. I said in the early days I felt ATI drivers were far better - this went on for months (and many of them).

    Still, they probably didn't know Vista was coming out eh?
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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Nvidia are fine now though? I haven't had any issues!

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by Koolpc View Post
    Nvidia are fine now though? I haven't had any issues!
    Yeah they're not too bad now - even us media center folk aren't suffering too heavily anymore (digital vibrance actually works!). It took them far, far too long though - ATI were basically stable even in beta versions of Vista for me.
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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by vinnyT View Post
    From the number of posts on this (and other) forum/s,
    Er, doesn't that just prove that more people run nVidia cards on this (and other) forums?

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Well I just tried to get the latest drivers for my 7300 GTS (2 in SLI Config) and it messes up my screen, max resolution it'll let me set to is 1280 x 800 when really need it setting at 1280 x 1024. Had to use Windows rollback to get previous drivers, and yes Im running Vista Home Premium with SP2.

    Me thinks would have been better going for a crossfire board now.

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    Er, doesn't that just prove that more people run nVidia cards on this (and other) forums?
    Good point - it could skew the result.

    I would stick by my assertion based on lots of testing in early 2007 for both work and home though.
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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    Er, doesn't that just prove that more people run nVidia cards on this (and other) forums?
    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.]

    If Nvidia had said, on the release of vista, that they would not have a fully compatable driver for most of their cards for at least six months would you have brought one, or gone for an ati card which was pretty stable evan at an early stage?

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    Er, doesn't that just prove that more people run nVidia cards on this (and other) forums?
    Just compare the proportion of nvidia to ati crashes to their respective market share at the time to answer that one...

    (I don't know what the answer is. Someone else can do the maths )
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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by Salazaar View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by kalniel View Post
    Er, doesn't that just prove that more people run nVidia cards on this (and other) forums?
    Just compare the proportion of nvidia to ati crashes to their respective market share at the time to answer that one...
    It is about a 3:1 ratio. Even if you include chipsets, I doubt nVidia has that much market share. They may dominate the high end, but on the midrange & low end the crown has changed hands a number of times over the last year or two.

    In any case I would argue that because nVidia have a high market share it is incumbent on them to put extra effort into their drivers because they affect so many users. Microsoft have a 100% market share on the drivers for boring things like usb drives and keyboards, and they appear to have got it right.

    I suspect part of the problem is the increase in dual and quad core systems, and the sheer difficulty in debugging issues on them. Linux users have know for years that nVidia drivers are a lot less stable on SMP systems, and presumably the windows and Linux drivers are based on the same core code. I have recently upgraded my Linux box from a single core to a quad core CPU, and I am now starting to see hard lockup crashes. I am fairly sure that the nVidia drivers are to blame.

    The problem is that that SMP related bugs are usually not reproducible in a deterministic way, making them hard to debug, so often the only way to investigate them is to run a system until it crashes and then examine memory etc. When you add in the fact that these crashes are fairly rare, (a once a week crash on a normal system will translate to a once every 20 weeks on a slowed down system running under a debugger), and that even when it crashes it can be quite hard to understand what caused the crash. Because of these difficulties nVidia would have to direct a lot of engineering effort at fixing these driver crashes, and they have probably decided that raw performance and features are more important, as that is what reviewers and the public focus on.

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    I honestly think it was simple: nVidia failed to get a handle on the new driver model as well as ATI did. The sheer weight of work required to support the new model (and it's 64bit incarnation as required by MS) must of been huge. I agree though - perhaps the hungrier underdog had more incentive.
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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    I had so much trouble with the Vista drivers when I had my 7900Gt that when I replaced it I went for an ATI3870 instead.
    It wouldn't have been so bad if they'd done anything about it but it seemed to me that all the driver releases were concentrating on fixes for the 8 series cards and 7900 owners could go hang.
    The nVidia forums were as much use as they usually are. All you get on there are the fanbois for whom nVidia can do no wrong.

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by dangel View Post
    I honestly think it was simple: nVidia failed to get a handle on the new driver model as well as ATI did. The sheer weight of work required to support the new model (and it's 64bit incarnation as required by MS) must of been huge. I agree though - perhaps the hungrier underdog had more incentive.
    i don't think 64-bit was the hurdle for them (they've supported 64-bit linux since 2002; 64-bit windows since 2003)

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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Quote Originally Posted by directhex View Post
    i don't think 64-bit was the hurdle for them (they've supported 64-bit linux since 2002; 64-bit windows since 2003)
    It certainly wouldn't of made life easier Vista is the first MS OS to bring 64bit to the consumer market in any big way - xp64 never made the radar.
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    Re: NVIDIA drivers revealed as cause of most early Vista crashes

    Just been noticing as well, since the rollback of the gfx drivers Ive done to resolve the nVidia res, whenever I right click on the desktop background my screen flciks off stating no display for approx 2 secs then my desktop reappears and the right click menu appears. Looks like most earyl, most current and possible most future problems in Vista for nVidia?

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