NVIDIA's Drivers Caused 28.8% Of Vista Crashes In 2007 344
PaisteUser tips us to an Ars Technica report discussing how 28.8% of Vista's crashes over a period in 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers. The information comes out of the 158 pages of Microsoft emails that were handed over at the request of a judge in the Vista-capable lawsuit. NVIDIA has already faced a class-action lawsuit over the drivers. From Ars Technica:
"NVIDIA had significant problems when it came time to transition its shiny, new G80 architecture from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The company's first G80-compatible Vista driver ended up being delayed from December to the end of January, and even then was available only as a beta download. In this case, full compatibility and stability did not come quickly, and the Internet is scattered with reports detailing graphics driver issues when using G80 processors for the entirely of 2007. There was always a question, however, of whether or not the problems were really that bad, or if reporting bias was painting a more negative picture of the current situation than what was actually occurring."
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What is the standard procedure? (Score:3, Informative)
Nvidia drivers cause crashes occasionally, but ATI's drivers are really terrible and cause all kinds of problems.
It seems primarily to be closed source components that cause problems on linux, i used to have big stability problems with netscape (consuming all my ram and lagging the rest of the machine) and issues with vmware (not so much crashes, more leaving the keyboard in an unusable state).
Nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Informative)
GPU Market Share
=================
Intel 37.6%
Nvidia 32.6%
AMD 19.5%
Source: http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9752280-37.html [news.com]
It would seem that AMD has managed to turn around their driver's stability and it is better than nVidia's, who apparently has a pretty poor record at the moment.
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Informative)
YMMW!
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Informative)
This is because it is not the driver who changes the resolution. It is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XRandR [wikipedia.org] who does the magic.
What makes me wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Informative)
At least now there is a installable kernel module which eliminates the hassle now.
Now upgrading from one release to another is just a matter of ensuring that every font/theme/style that was installed before is installed again.
Re:Not surprised (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Informative)
It's always good to RTFM
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Informative)
I prefer to look at it this way: The good folks at NVIDIA obviously aren't doing a perfect job, so why can't they enlist some (free) help? With the proper specifications in hand*, anything is possible. So I dare to say "yes", a thousand geeks with free time to burn can certainly do better.
As for the OP's crack about opening the drivers themselves, NVIDIA needs a massive reality check: they're in the *hardware* business - the drivers just make their cards more marketable. And given that those drivers are known to be a major PITA on some environments (Linux and now Vista), it certainly isn't helping their position.
(* Yea, they probably want to guard this with an iron-clad NDA and know all your PII before you sign it. I've always found this to be sparse logic at best since we're just talking about stuff that can be reverse engineered for one, and two, all a developer needs is what bits to set and when; it's not like that crap is necessarily a company's bread-and-butter. )
</rant>
It's already here and more will come. (Score:1, Informative)
Nvidia already dishes out specs and programmer time for 2D drivers [slashdot.org]. It's second rate treatment [wikipedia.org] but it's a start. Nouveau [wikipedia.org] and both Intel and ATI's full bore release of documentation will light a fire under Nvidia [slashdot.org] that should produce more.
Vista must die for this to happen. (Score:3, Informative)
From Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
Source article [auckland.ac.nz]
This is the only way the "trusted path" will work and it would be convenient for Microsoft if people and institutions [theregister.co.uk] did not realize that this is an unacceptable way of doing things [slashdot.org].
Re:What makes me wonder... (Score:2, Informative)
Omega Drivers? Personal responsibility? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Sounds a lot like finger pointing to me (Score:5, Informative)
http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/eb1936c0-e19c-4a17-a1a8-39292e4929a41033.mspx?mfr=true [microsoft.com]
Depending on what version of "blame Microsoft" you are responding to the complaint may or may not be legitimate.
Windows NT 3.51 may have been the most stable version of Windows in history. I think it was the one on which Microsoft spent the most time and money on testing and on a fairly massive scale went out and helped hardware and driver people with their testing (providing labs with a large variety of configurations etc.). They were trying to solidify the Windows base within businesses, and convince businesses that Windows was no longer a toy (i.e. gaming) operating system only. The goal, among other things was to get people off of OS/2, older versions of Windows (93 and WFW).
The program was a great success. Not only did large parts of the federal government switch, I even made the switch on my home machines. Unless you were a gamer (in which case you would have still been running 95 or then 98) you could have experienced a relatively unbloated and crash-free Windows experience. It was the lat time I tried running Windows for days on end without regular restorative reboots.
As the link states:In point of fact, video drivers could "fail" prior to 4.0 and only cause minor screen corruption or glitches, or in fact be asymptomatic. After 4.0 though, the same failure might cause a system crash, or might cause other programs to appear to crash, or might cause disk I/O buffers to contain garbage that would subsequently be written out to disk and cause crashes hours later, not to mention you wondering why your spreadsheets were deteriorating over time.
I don't remember Microsoft going out and asking video vendors if they thought this was all a good idea. In fact the element of surprise was very important to MS for some reason on the 4.0 announcement... no pre-announcement of features being added or removed as there were for years leading up to Vista. They certainly didn't ask me. I left the meeting telling my colleagues taht this was nuts. And I don't think they gave either vendors or users much time to adjust to the changes as I went from thinking that Windows had finally arrived to wishing I had stayed with OS/2.
From what I read, MS no longer does the extensive testing they did for 3.51, and in fact they make driver and hardware makers pay them for any help they get in order to be "certified". Having won the game of becoming THE business operating system, MS said "screw you" to the partners that helped them get there. Typical.
MS engineers bragged about being geniuses during the 4.0 product roll-out for moving drivers to kernel space, but the move was necessary due to GUI bloat that was added for that release. Subsequent bloat of that nature has made each subsequent version of Windows seem less snappy and take up more memory, and no doubt the next product roll-out after 4.0 (at which point I had stopped attending) I'm sure the MS engineers bragged about being geniuses for moving drivers back into user-mode for reliability reasons. Both moves might have cause significant adjustments to be made by driver makers on short notice depending, for example, on whether they were relying on memory protection and changing the nature of their context switches.
If you don't blame Microsoft for some of these driver problems you either work there, or haven't been paying attention for long enough.
Re:What makes me wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:3, Informative)
Pardon me for interrupting your Two Minutes Hate (Score:2, Informative)
One can always count on any thread on /. about Windows Vista to generate posts full of verve, passion, and technical ignorance. So far the responses have included long rants about NVIDIA's (and other video vendor's) policy towards Linux drivers, the usual anti-Vista FUD from posters who are proud of their lack of actual experience with the OS, and even the old "DRM sux" chestnut.
XPDM (the current nomenclature for the Windows Driver Model for Windows XP video) was the end-point of a decade of side-by-side work between the DirectX graphics technology (DirectDraw/Direct3D) and the core Graphics Device Interface (GDI). It worked, but only when the OS itself never used 3D features at all. In fact, 3D applications were extremely limited in their ability to multi-task the GPU, and writing XPDM drivers had become extremely complex. After years of experience writing & optimizing drivers for Direct3D9, it was obvious that the bottlenecks for future performance growth were in the driver stack itself. Many years of work lead to the development of WDDM (the nomenclature for the Windows Display Driver Model for Windows Vista video) to address GPU-sharing, 'small-batch' performance overhead, and to unify the GDI/Direct3D APIs to simplify driver development.
Drivers have always been a major source of crash reports. This is fairly obvious for any OS that has a 3rd party plug-in model: MSFT can test the OS with the drivers it ships with, but it cannot test every possible combination of hardware in the market. Windows Error Reporting (aka WATSON) provides numerous data points that help MSFT find these problems, and video drivers crashing in kernel-mode remains a key source of crashes on XPDM. Part of this comes from the complexity of supporting both GDI and Direct3D DDI at the same time, but a lot of it comes from the problem space inherent in programmable shader GPUs. XPDM drivers include shader compilers, and these code bases are like most compilers for non-trivial cases: difficult to get right 100% of the time. Therefore, one of the design features of WDDM was segregating the video driver into a kernel-mode piece and a user-mode piece, so that crashes in complex shader compilers would result in user-mode applications crashes, not BSOD. I note that the original article cited in this thread doesn't state if these are application crashes or BSOD crashes. WDDM didn't just change for the sake of change, but to invest in the needs of the next 5-10 years of video graphics performance, stability, and security.
While MSFT, the hardware vendors, and end-users would all like to have seen 100% rock-solid WDDM drivers and full performance optimizations across Direct3D9 (XP-era games), Direct3D9Ex (the new Windows Vista Shell), and Direct3D 10 the day Windows Vista shipped, the work involved was immense and the timing very tight. AMD/ATI & NVIDIA were developing major revs of their hardware which market realities demanded worked well on XP (and all the benchmarks at the time would judge them on XPDM), at the same time they were supporting an entirely new driver model and new API, had to support both 32-bit x86 and 64-bit x64 native kernel-mode drivers to get full coverage for the transition to 64-bit mandated by the Windows driver logo programs, and deal with the technical challenges 512 MB+ VRAMs created for SLI/Crossfire and PC BIOS compatibility. All that while investing in their own initiatives (CUDA, OpenGL, Linux, etc.) and dealing with things like the AMD / ATI merger.
The transition from XPDM to WDDM is no more messy than the transition from Windows 9x/ME was to NT/2000. There are a lot of moving pieces, a lot of actors to coordinate, and a great deal of technical challenges to overcome and new optimization expertise to develop. As with the previous transitions, it took a year or so to get the kinks worked out, and today the latest WDDM drivers are in pretty good shape overall.
Now back to your regularly scheduled Schadenfreude...