NVIDIA drivers caused big chunk of Vista crashes

Posted by admin

March 30, 2008

NVIDIA was responsible for almost 30 percent of all recorded Windows Vista crashes in an unspecified period in 2007, according to documents obtained by Ars Technica.

According to internal Microsoft emails uncovered during the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit, Nvidias drivers were responsible for almost 29 percent of logged crashes over an unspecified period during 2007.

Its fair to say that Windows Vistas first year in service hasnt been the best of starts for Microsofts latest operating system. Things got worse when the Vista Capable lawsuit rose into the limelight because all of a sudden, it looked like Microsoft had knowingly deceived its customers. This wasnt helped at all with more than a lions share of vendors unable to deliver solid drivers in time for the operating systems late January 2007 launch.

NVIDIA had a lot of problems with the transition to Windows Vista – it not only had a lot of driver work to do for its GeForce 7-series products, including the GeForce 7950 GX2 that relied on SLI technology to achieve its performance characteristics, but it also had just released its new G80 architecture.

The company delivered WHQL drivers for its GeForce 7-series products—although minus SLI support—well before launch, while the new GeForce 8800 GTS and GeForce 8800 GTX graphics cards were given beta support on the day of Vistas release. It took NVIDIA a long time to deliver beta drivers (with SLI support) for the GeForce 7950 GX2 and that left us with a bit of a sour taste in our mouths.

If anything, these numbers merely prove that there were some quite widespread teething problems with NVIDIA drivers in Vistas early days. Things are a lot better now, but even then people are still complaining about NVIDIA drivers causing crashes.

Microsoft, on the other hand, was responsible for almost 18 percent of the logged Vista crashes, while ATI caused a further 9.3 percent of crashes. What it is important to note here is that NVIDIA has a much larger market share than ATI in the discrete graphics card market, so in actual fact the results may not be as bad as they appear to be. However, without additional data on how many unique systems logged Vista crashes, its impossible to draw conclusions based on the combination of the data presented here and discrete graphics card marketshare.

Obviously, driver issues are nothing new and the advent of multi-GPU technologies exaggerates those problems because of the amount of driver development work associated with getting multiple GPUs to work together effectively and it gave Vista a bad reputation as an unstable and buggy operating system.

Given the size of Service Pack 1, there were some massive changes to the OS in order to fix some of the well-documented problems, but that doesnt account for everything – there is no doubt that driver issues were responsible for some of the poor reception that Vista received in its early days.

From bit-tech.

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