News NVIDIA Vista shenanigans roll on

[WilHarris]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/02...igans_roll_on/

[DougEdey]

They can't fix problems that they don't know about, of course it takes time to fix bugs but the more people that use the current drivers the more results they can get and the better they can make them

[Echo]

Should I be worried about installing vista on the soon-to-be rig in my siggy? Is there support for 7800GT SLi?

[HugoB]

The thought occurs that this may shed some light on why ATI/AMD have delayed their R600 card.

[[USRF]Obiwan]

I highly suspect there is a "issue" with the 8800 hardware.

just think about it. Nvidia had at least 6 months time (or even more) before the official release of vista. This is more then enough time to make a wonderfull vista driver for the 8800 hardware. But Nvidia did not even manage to get a working 'beta' driver for the release. This looks very suspicous. The truth will come out about this.

[DougEdey]

There's nothing suspicious about it, Vistas driver system has changed massively since XP and nVidia didn't get the RTM version of Vista until close to launch and Graphics drivers are a few million lines of code now.

[Nikumba]

Saying its not nVidias fault they didnt get RTM code till close to release is utter nonsene.

Yes there has been a fundamental shift in how graphics are handled in Vista but these have been know since Vista started its Beta rollout. I am sure nVidia had close to retail hardware of teh 8800 range sometime the middle of last year giving them a full 6 months almost to get a decent driver up and running, Im not saying a perfect driver.

It could be there is an issue with the DX10 path in the GPU, or it could be nVidia driver are not addressing DX10 correctly. We wont know and I doubt we will ever know the real issue, only the marketing reason.

[DougEdey]

I'd like to see you code and debug millions of lines of code within 6 months.

[bubsterboo]

Ive always been impressed with nvidias driver support, i don't think they will take too long.

[mmorgue]

I would have expected, what with the focus on dx10, MS & the 3rd party driver developers (i.e., nvidia) would have done far more driver testing or at the least, communicated better to ensure a "smooth"(er) launch.

With so much recent focus on Vista opening up multimedia avenues and the latest dx10 vid cards making games come to life, etc, that you cannot "rely" on your dx10 card to reliably run on the latest dx10 OS is just abysmal.

[r4tch3t]

Originally Posted by Archangel

The thought occurs that this may shed some light on why ATI/AMD have delayed their R600 card.

My thoughts exactly.
Sure nVidia should have drivers for vista, and they did bring out a driver for them, but it is beta. I reckon that they couldn't get the code working properly for Vista, but did have limited success, so released that as a beta so that at least the 8800s can be used. All the while they will be working on new drivers that work as good as or better than the XP ones.

[Djpuk]

That has certainly made me put my money back in the savings account, think I will wait until this is sorted before I start buying the bits for my new rig.
Nvidia usually are very good with drivers I agree so I would hope it is weeks rather than months

[Panos]

I own a 8800GTS but I'm not worried a lot. Why?

a) There isn't any DX10 game out. In this situation Nvidia needs to work closely with a DX10 project, eg Crysis, to solve on their drivers issue. If that project isn't ready yet, they cannot speculate how to write the proper driver. Yes they may have house made DX10 demo testing, maybe for months, BUT there aren't any 3rd party working games.
Regarding the time the driver needs to be ready, companies like Nvidia, AMD/ATI, Intel, etc have Vista on their hands for months now (if not a year). But if MS give them crap code and it's not able to work on, then?

b) With DX10 they have to reinvate the wheel. All the drivers should start from zero lines clean without bugs.

c) We all know that even MS hasn't manage yet to make compatible their own products with Vista.

d) All the complains about the perfomance has to do with the Vista. MS announced back in September that ALL games will be slower under Vista than XP by 10& to 35%. And that's a lot. Also think how many have the Aero under 1GB RAM trying to play a game. If this kind of crap sits on the memory (gfx & RAM) it will slow down everything. (Home Basic is your friend for gaming).

e) Regarding Dell's move. If I was Dell I would do the same. I want to sell my stupid expensive machines NOW not in a month. Think about that Dell was selling SLI 7900GS for £400/$800 (the 2 cards only for £400, the rest of the system was £1K+) around Xmas as their ultimate gaming machine. And I got my 8800GTS for £230 just bit before that.

Currently I use my 8800GTS under Vista RC2 (I have my free package as MSDN member from MS but I will not install it yet), and I had only few performance issues (Oblivion) which I know is the Vista responsible not the 100.59 drivers. After all why to use Vista for DX9??? I have the partition ready for DX10 only.

[quack]

Meh, I don't even care about the 8800. I do however care about my nForce2 board which is terribly supported by NVIDIA (i.e. almost not at all) when it's more than capable to run Vista if the right drivers existed!

[DXR_13KE]

Originally Posted by DougEdey

I'd like to see you code and debug millions of lines of code within 6 months.

if my daily work is codding and nothing else..... and have all the best tools... bring it on

[squeck]

i'm dual booting vista ultimate and xp at the mo with a single 8800gtx on an nforce4 board. i can play games like world of warcraft on vista but they are noticibly slower and i can't play video on my 2nd monitor at the same time which i can do in xp. so for the time being i'll carry on playing games on xp.

however i don't think there is any excuse for nvidia to not have stable drivers - even if they don't support all features. there aren't any dx10 games out, i'm not too bothered about a dx10 driver now BUT i do want a stable dx9 driver. i don't think its too much to ask having bought a £450 graphics card off them... also the nforce 4 drivers are awful - some of the onboard devices still aren't recognised by vista.

needless to say i'm not a happy person.

[radodrill]

MS was still overhauling their code in Q4 2006.

How can you expect nVidia to devote their full efforts on writing drivers for an OS that isn't even finalized. Now that the release OS is finished nVidia can concentrate on writing a compatible driver set.

First releases of software/hardware are often a bit buggy until software/firmware/driver updates are released. Combine new hardware and new software all at once and you should expect to initially face troubles.

[Tim S]

Originally Posted by DXR_13KE

if my daily work is codding and nothing else..... and have all the best tools... bring it on

I believe Nvidia's current drivers are larger than Windows NT4 (in terms of number of code lines)

[randosome]

as far as I've seen this (from the outside)

Microsoft brought out RC2 very late in 2006, then very quickly vista is being made available (business by December and everything else in January)

If i were nvidia i wouldn't start work on drivers (or not serious work) until i know that what I'm programming isn't likely to change too much
I was quite surprised how quickly MS made RC2 to gold, and people who have MSDN still said there were like 800 bugs when they made it gold

So although i think its odd that nvidia cant get 8800's working on DX9, i wouldn't say its all their fault
When will people learn that early adopters always get screwed, I'm not even considering vista until SP1

Jeez does anyone remember the XP launch, the number of complaints there were about it until SP1 were amazing

[Redbeaver]

heh im just sad my SLI doesnt work

nvidia recognize both card, even the SLI, but performance is the same whether i use single or SLI.... sucks..............

i need an SLI driver for 7 series! forget about 8 series, there isnt much of u guys out there anyway especially compared to us 7 series owners.....