News Nvidia drivers caused big chunk of Vista crashes

That's a very good point.

 

And they're still causing the occasional problem; with a fresh Vista install and the latest 169.25 drivers I was regularly getting the notorious "nvlddmkm.sys" BSOD at the end of boot. Bad enough for me to seriously consider a return to XP.

Removing the newer drivers and installing the older ones from the Vista disc seems to have fixed things - now happy with Vista but very wary of trying the next nVidia attempt.

 

lol, i get you contributes to 1% of total crash?

yeah, nVidia drivers are horrible, especially the dreaded nvlddmkl.sys

 

there are leaked betas of 174+ atm which are piles better then the ones on nvidias site.

 

Greetings!

That number is correct only for the discrete graphics market of last quarter, not the overall market. Intel continues to be the leader on graphic market.

And, the ArsTechnica article refers to systems crashes regardless of type of graphic (discrete or integrated), that makes the 28,8% an impressive figure, in a very negative way.

 

Of course it does, but in comparison to ATI, the number of Nvidia crashes is fairly proportionate to marketshare in the discrete market - that's the point I'm making. Intel caused very few crashes--especially considering overall marketshare--but that wasn't what I was extrapolating from the article.

Regardless, the problems were very real and we experienced many of the headaches ourselves in the early days. Most of our early Vista testing was done on ATI cards because the Nvidia drivers were pretty much unusable from our perspective - the lack of SLI support (or full support for the 7950 GX2... depending on which way you look at it) was just the icing on the cake.

 

never had any problems with my 7600gt or 8800gts drivers on vista. 8800gts drivers on linux is another matter entirely.

 

Had terrible luck with Vista drivers for my 7900GS, nVidia Control Panel crashed every time I tried to start, using 2 different driver versions(169.XX was the newest of the two). I had a few issues with image quality in Just Cause that I didn't get in XP along with the nVidia Vista drivers not working properly with the newest ATI Tool beta and RivaTuner at the driver level. I'm going to stick with XP until I get a DX10 card and there are enough games to be worth playing under DX10.

 

Personally, driver instability has probably tainted my view of vista a bit

But overall, in the grand scheme of things, driver support is hardly 1 of the big down points of vista

 

like I always told my friend nVidia has by far the worse driver and customer support.

 

I get the Driver problem where Vista resets my screen resolution from 2560*1600 to 800*600 apon each start up (cold boot or re-boot) And yes, it is annoying. Halo 2 Vista seems to be able to make my drivers crash, which is ironic, haha.

Sam

 

Greetings!

The marketshare in the discrete graphic market is irrelevant to the discussion since the ArsTechnica article is not looking to that particular market, its looking to the total market, regardless of discrete or onboard graphics, desktop or laptop.

If keeping to graphic market (and ignoring chipsets, another cause of errors), the available numbers for marketshare, discrete and onboad, usually referenced are these:
http://www.jonpeddie.com/about/press/2008/GPU_market_Q407.shtml

As you can see, the ratio between ATi and nVidia in Q407 is roughly 1:2, while in Q406, the time of Vista introduction, the ratio was 1:1,2.
Comparing these ratios to the ArsTechnica error numbers, 9,3% and 28,8%, or a 1:3 ratio, gives an idea on how badly nVidia dropped the ball in the initial Vista support, compared to ATi.

That said, Intel did gave a lot less headaches in Vista, considering graphics and chipsets marketshare.