Should Manufacturers Get their Drivers In Order Before Unleashing Expensive Hardware?

OK, this isnt just about Nvidia and ATI, but, after months of waiting, and being a guinnea pig for Nvidia, the 8800 series drivers are a bit better, but not great for everyone, however, for around 5 months, they were complete and utter garbage.

Looking at the New ATI cards, they seem to have their own driver problems, as did the X1900 series before them.

Does anyone agree with me that 5 + months is a seriously unreasonable amount of time for us to be waiting for working drivers?

Shouldn't manufacturers be less eager to release the expensive hardware when there aren't any proper working drivers? I understand that there are always going to be conflicts and problems with drivers, but some of the problems were with things as mundane as the desktop in XP going mental for no aparent reason.

So, what I'm saying is, would you rather have the hardware released now, and be a guinnea pig, or have the hardware released 6-8 months down the line, with drivers that work with your O/S?

I know what I would prefer.

100% agreement - spitting out top of the range technology and then providing drivers which are often (let's be charitable) complete cack just isn't on. I'd much rather wait a bit longer until they've got it all right (or at least nearly right). I'm an 8800 GTX owner and the drivers have not been that good until quite recently. You wouldn't want to buy a sports car with a lawnmower engine fitted.

On a slight tangent the lack of support for things like the Creative X-Fi (I know there are drivers now but I think they're still a bit borked to say the least) and the Netgear SC101 on Vista, x number of months after it's released are really annoying too. I'm sticking with XP because of the issues above. (I know it's not quite the same argument but I find it equally annoying too.)

Although i see the point......i dont really agree.

Its VERY annoying that new generation hardware isn't supported very well at first but surely thats expected.

Everything has a bedding in period.

If you are prepared to pay over-inflated prices to be ' the first to use' then its part and parcel of this.
All the pitfalls are obviously there but some of us still take the risk and RISK is the word. (or is that 'Grease'? :p )

Unfortunately, these parts cant be released and Beta tested by the provisional users or im sure they would be.

Way to avoid - Use lasts years hardware/software.

I wholeheartly agree.

I've been the victim of buying "cutting edge" hardware only to be told that the fix would be released later down the line.

As such, my serial upgrading days are over. My systems stable ( well now it is after last night ) and it still performs well and as such I'm not comtemplating upgrades until all the issues with the Core2Duo etc are released.

I was on of the early 8800GTS owners and in 6 months I havent had any issues with it or my X-fi, you cant expect companies to test their hardware on loads of different hardware combinations/games because then nothing would ever get released.

IMO waiting 1 year + to get drivers right would slow down the rate at witch hardware is advancing.

I think that expecting drivers for cutting edge hardware to be absolutely bug-free is unrealistic, but that said, there are limits - look at the number of people who bought 8800 series cards as soon as they hit the shelves, in boxes that advertised Vista and DX10 support, only to find that there were no drivers that enabled any such things. THAT'S unacceptable.

I vote option 3

O Meh! I cannot aford to keep up with the cutting edge.


Money aside we're also in this situation where ATi and Nvidia are the only real 2 graphics chipset manufactors left and they are inconstant warfair for market share.

Let's face it the moement vista came out loads of people were clammoring for dx10 cards (even though nothing uses dx10 yet) so to keep people happy they had to realese something.

The problem wasn't so much new hardware/drivers it was Vista being in the mix too - Vista has an entirely new driver model (and DX10) which has caused major headaches for both ATI and nVidia. The workload of supporting new hardware whilst basically ground-up rewriting the drivers is no doubt staggering and hence the pain. It'll be interesting to see if it takes ATI six months to get half decent drivers (it did nVidia - they're still far from perfect) now they've DX10 hardware in stores.

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Originally Posted by Blitzen

Its VERY annoying that new generation hardware isn't supported very well at first but surely thats expected.

Everything has a bedding in period.

Unfortunately, these parts cant be released and Beta tested by the provisional users or im sure they would be.

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This is exactly my point. You automatically assume that you should expect poor support, but if the hardware was put back several months, then there wouldnt be that problem would there? The hardware would still be cutting edge, and it would work much better than if it had been released earlier (I think).

Bedding in period - Personally, I dont believe that. I know it takes a while to iron a lot of the bugs out, but these huge companies that charge huge premiums for hardware should do the majority of the testing themselves (in my opinion) before release. I find it impossible to believe that nobody at Nvidia experienced the flashing desktop driver error, and it wasnt just one config of hardware, or limited to one O/S.

I'm looking for better testing, not absolute perfection for everyone, just a set of drivers, that will work reasonably well, I dont think that is too much to ask when paying the prices that they ask for their hardware.

well i upgraded from 2 7900gtx's to a 8800 due to the lack of driver support.. almost a year and the cards never ran right in some games..

now im playing the waiting game with nvidia again, if it wasnt for some drivers that never showed on nvidias website i would be sat with a doorstop..

Yes they should, it's annoying having rubbish drivers for some thing that could be so good :angst:

Well, you want to go on the Hauppage UK support forum, there was a good deal a while back on one of their TV cards, the HVR 1300, the vista x64 drivers were "in the making"... That lasted about 6 months and suddenly last week they announced they were not doing them! Considering that new the card is worth prob £100+, you have got some p***d off people - the box said something about Vista compatible or compliant - which incidentally does not always mean there are drivers!!:angst:

I hate Hauppage. The :censored:s!!

There are so much stuff that can whack the driver you can never find and fix them all given a "relatively" small testing lab. I don't suppose they got 100000 different computers all doing driver testing. It would really be cheaper and quicker for the company to let people "public beta" it.

However I think they should do some sort of rebate / cash back to "compensate" early-adopters

If I fork out 400 notes for a top of the range graphics card am I wrong in expecting everything to work out of the box without having to wait on beta drivers or whatnot? I don't think so...

One of the main reasons i went back to XP from vista is because there werent (and still isnt) decent drivers for it. What percentage of budget goes on driver development compared to hardware?