News Nvidia drivers caused big chunk of Vista crashes

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/03/27/nvidia_drivers_caused_big_chunk_of_vista_crashes/1

Internal Microsoft emails have revealed that Nvidia's drivers were responsible for 29 percent of crashes in Vista's early days.

 

exactly my recent situation.
had an 8600 gt, crashed, crashed, fried.
got a free upgrade (Best buy didn't realize what they were doing, yeah for the geek squad just being kids in suits, and not actual computer people) to an 8600gts OC 512 (good card for the money) and when i ran Ntune, crashed windows all the time again (even with stock settings) took Ntune off, and now she purrs like a kitten again.

Nvidia is having vista issues, no doubt.

 

I have had minor issues with the driver (the one on the cd) for my HP network printer, I even got the infamous BSoD, but once I got the driver of the website, the problems magically went away.

 

NVIDIA definitely has a larger share of the discrete video card market, sure, but it's nowhere near three times as large. NVIDIA's early Vista drivers sucked, and that's that.

 

Actually that is not 100% right... Ntune also gives issues in XP. That is why most if not all forums tell you to never install it i the first place. I am glad you got a free upgrade for your headaches.

 

They absolutely did suck, but I think you'll find that currently Nvidia has around 71 percent of the discrete market, while ATI's share makes up most of the remainder.

 

Never had a driver problem. I can see early adopters would have issues but its surprising to see Nvidia messed up here.

 

Wow, so almost half of all crashes were due to video drivers (ATI + Nvidia)? That's pretty shocking really.

 

Mine still crashes with nVidia drivers (BFG 6600GTOC).

 

nope, xp still worked fine for me.

 

lotsa people playing LOTRO having problems with Vista + Geforce8-series.......

 

Just wish they would hurry up and release some new Vista 64bit drivers, still on the 169 from December

Kimbie

 

Pinning this on nVidia seems kinda unfair. Microsoft rushes Vista to the shelves and nVidia can't push out updated drivers fast enough and nVidia gets blamed? I'd also like to point out that 17.0% of crashes being caused by an "unknown" problem means you can add that number to the percentage caused by Microsoft.

Of course, I got Vista HP 64 and an 8800GT last Nov... haven't had a driver error yet. It seems to me that more driver issues occurred with people running 32-bit Vista.

 

I'm having enough problems with nVidia drivers in XP.

 

Only ever had one driver issue, and that was when I was playing a game and watching TV at the same time.

 

At least by moving to a new machine running vista I've been able to move away from my nForce3 mobo, becuase the nvidia drivers for that were rubbish. (eg disabling the network port in windows would cause a hard reset).
Had a few little problems in games that I'd put down to the nVidia drivers, but then I am using x64 (same setup as MrMunroe).

 

Nvidia had plenty of time to get their drivers ready upon the release of Vista; after all, it was hardly "rushed" to market. They undoubtably, at the very minimum, had access to the same beta and RC versions that everyone else on the interwebs did. However, the fact that they were going through some pretty large architectural changes (think: G80) in the hardware department and the fact that drivers for discrete GPUs span millions upon millions of lines of code; it was never going to be a walk in the park.

IIRC, despite the fact that they really did balls up their early vista drivers, they were fairly transparent about the fact that they were having some issues but were beavering away to fix them. The Nvidia drivers since then though have been much better and in general, I think they have the edge over their ATi counterparts (who lets face it have more then their fair share of issues, with things like multi-gpu scaling and plain "weird" issues like the 3870x2 "not liking" 1680x1050).

As for the ntune quibbles, that program has always sucked. Be it XP or Vista, you'll encounter similar issues so it's kind of irrelevant here tbh.

The fact that Nvidia haven't released any WHQL drivers for the G80 line of cards since December is a little dissapointing though. We see beta releases popping up all over the place for the new G92/G94 line (174.xx) and it seems that it is where Nvidia are currently focusing their resources (makes sense, being a new release an' all). Most of these drivers can be made compatible with the G80 series via a modified .inf file, but these have given me nothing but headaches with my GTX. One notable exception (and maybe a sign of good things to come) has been the 174.70 beta drivers that I've linked to elsewhere on the forums. These have given me spot-on IQ, excellent performance and (touch wood) not one crash or other issue thus far.

 

I didnt have driver issues, just pure fustration issues.

 

i made a quick jump to vista back in august last year and yeah they were quite bad (sli was even worse) I made the jump again recently and ive honestly not had any stability issues at all

 

And of course, let's not forget, if someone overclocks their graphics card and causes a hang/crash, it will appear as a crash caused by the graphics card drivers. XP didn't have this kind of logging, so it's a little more difficult to tell just how good (Or bad) this report is.