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."
Not surprised (Score:2, Insightful)
The ow starts now (Score:4, Insightful)
"The Wow Starts, oh around 2009 if you'll just let us fix this, upgrade that and force you to buy some new stuff" Should have been the tagline for Vista.
Re:What is the standard procedure? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that in the race to produce the biggest, baddest, fastest, video cards for gamers, ATI/AMD and NVIDIA have often overlooked stability for performance. I don't know about you, but I'd gladly trade off a couple of FPS for a card that was rock solid stable.
Re:The ow starts now (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What is the standard procedure? (Score:5, Insightful)
'Windows Certified'? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Certified (Score:5, Insightful)
If they didn't, its partly because they took the blame, as they should.
It's a cultural problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:O RLY? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm relieved (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm relieved (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The drivers contain code licensed from third-parties, such that opening the source would require extensive contracts, negotiations, and more licensing. Probably most of these third-party software vendors won't agree to have their code opened for the same reasons that all closed-source companies keep their source closed.
2. Modern video cards (and other hardware too, probably) contain a surprising amount of their logic and "acceleration magic" in the driver. The card itself, though dedicated to a particular hardware task, is quite general and thus the code controlling the card contains many of the important 'tricks' to get good performance. (In fact I've been told that the difference between some cards and higher models is only in the driver.) In such cases, releasing the software code would be like releasing the hardware circuit diagram: it would reveal many of their trade secrets (some of which may be patent-protected, others not).
3. Even if it would be illegal, some people would modify and redistribute the code. Hobbyist hackers would alter the code and recompile. This might allow end-users to bypass restrictions on the card, enable other features (effectively upgrade the card by bypassing lockouts), and so on. This makes lock-in harder, and might reduce the frequency that people upgrade their hardware.
4. Their code, in all likelihood, violates a large number of competitor patents. As long as the violations are buried inside a binary, no one will notice. Opening the code would make it easy for a competitor to spot violations and sue. Probably all the companies violate each other's hardware and software patents, but they maintain an uneasy balance by all being secretive. If one company released too much information, the others would use it against them.
5. The company may worry about other liabilities that they become exposed to when users and competitors can peruse the codebase.
As I said, only the companies know for sure. But there are plenty of plausible reasons for why a hardware company wouldn't want to release driver source code. They are not great reasons (many of us would be more willing to buy the hardware if it had more documentation and/or open code), but they make business sense.
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not surprised (Score:5, Insightful)
However, I will say that ATI's Linux drivers have come on leaps and bounds since AMD took the helm. They're still sucky, but they now only about twice as sucky as nVidia, as opposed to the binary equivalent of disemboweling yourself with a grapefruit spoon. The fact that, thanks to AMD publishing the specs for the silicon, a fully OSS, clean room, accelerated driver is now possible is also a colossal boon, and I suspect that within a few months the RadeonHD driver will be featureful and stable enough to be more than adequate for most people, once the distros start picking up on it.
Then, of course, it'd be nice if someone could write a way of accelerating video so that all us Linux users without eleventy billion jiggahurtz processors could play back 1080p H.264...
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Insightful)
They might have more direct knowledge of the hardware, but there is strength in numbers.
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you are saying 1.000.000 knowledgeable geeks would be working to fix the driver ? Talk about wishful thinking.
I say 10, at most.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
"It worked for me" - I don't really care.
Statistics on the cause of crashes - I don't really care.
Anybody running unsigned drivers and experiencing crashes - I don't really care
Hang on. Let me explain.
The fact that you can STILL crash a Windows machine with a dodgy driver - that I care about. I thought everything was supposed to be userspace. I thought the error-handling was supposed to be better. I thought that Windows was supposed to be more stable and secure. I thought people who were using signed drivers were supposed to be "approved" and relatively crash-free.
Unsigned drivers? You can't support that no matter who you are, unless you're confident they are PURE userspace - they could be doing anything (like the 3DFX drivers that used to open access to all sorts of things it shouldn't in order for a primitive user-space part to actual drive the hardware). That's why you have to click that "CONTINUE Anyway" button with the dire warning. That's the Windows equivalent of kernel tainting. Once you've done that, nobody cares. The fact that most XP drivers are still using uncertified drivers is a bit of a problem but I can understand the reasons why. But you can't blame MS for crashes in uncertified drivers under XP. I thought Vista was supposed to be different, though.
If a certified driver is crashing that often, then you have an entirely different matter. The certification effectively becomes worthless. Nobody trusts it. Therefore every driver manufacturer ignores certification and just tells users to click "Continue". Then you will have nothing BUT uncertified drivers. Catch-22.
Blue screens should not happen. They certainly shouldn't happen often enough that people have coined the term "blue-screen" or BSOD to mean a crash. When they DO happen, when the driver goes absolutely nuts and starts stomping memory, aren't things like DEP and the user-space driver model supposed to STOP that happening and recover in some half-decent fashion? Or shouldn't the machine at least what the cause was and provide the user with some hint of what went wrong (i.e. "You installed an uncertified driver. Tough.").
Let's compare for a second - Linux kernels crash too. They crash much more often if third-party drivers are installed and nobody really cares about that except the third-party and their users. When they do crash, there's not much you can do but most of the time you'll get all sorts of debugging information and usually you can carry on. You might lose X, which may or may not load up again - I have a laptop that likes to crash X if I run more than one copy of Xine at a time but the worst that happens is X dies and restarts and then carries on working for hours/days/weeks as if nothing had happened (and yes, I need to update the kernel/X on that machine!) but things keep on working as best they can. You can do pretty much what you like in terms of software but the worst that'll happen if you're not actually loading a kernel module or patching a kernel or playing with kernel-level features is a software crash and be chucked back to the command-line. Sometimes you might even end up taking out X, like my example above.
You can rip out the harddrive and *make* the kernel crash but most of the time things will carry on, just without the component you ripped out (i.e. the IDE layer may die, but it'll still keep running as best it can without it). Even when Linux comes to a complete halt and freezes, you have debugging information and logs with which to narrow down the cause yourself, without needing to consult Linus himself.
When Windows crashes (even with certified drivers and clean installs), there's bugger all to go on. Half the time the event log doesn't show anything at all. The second you see a blue screen, the computer is down and there's little arguing. There's zero information to go on. You have no idea what caused the crash at all because usually all you get is a generic STOP error and a
Re:Not surprised (Score:3, Insightful)
Your comment regard FPS shows a little bit of ignorance on why have a high MAX FPS is important.
When you have 60 people with effects going off all over the place, that 400FPS suddenly becomes 60FPS, which is what you want. 30FPS looks a little choppy, an effect from page flipping.
For the record, I haven't had stability problems with nVidia for over 10 years.
As for this report, lets not forget MS didn't give final specs to many companies until they were very close to releasing. And it seems they released easlier then some people in MS wanted to.
Not excusing nVidia, just pointing out that it's a little more complicated then "nVidia screwed up our perfect stable release of the greatest OS ever!(DOn't forget windows 7 is coming)"
Re:Minimal problems with 169 series (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, your uber OS may have stayed "on" in that it could reload all that crap without having to spend 20 seconds rebooting, but for all intents and purposes from a user perspective, your whole OS just freaking crashed.
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:2, Insightful)
Point Missed. (Score:2, Insightful)
nVidia had plenty of time for Vista launch (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually Microsoft had been talking to the graphics IHVs about the new Longhorn "Advanced Driver Model" as early as spring 2005. Both ATI and nVidia had representatives (i.e., developers) working closely with Redmond during that time. The Longhorn/Vista display model became known as "WDDM" and was more or less locked down, from what I understand, by late 2005. By the time of WinHEC 2006 (April), they were already talking about WDDM 2.0, as you can see from this presentation [microsoft.com]. If you take a look at the slide deck, ATI's Tim Kelley actually delivered part of the presentation on WDDM 2.0.
Frankly, I don't think nVidia invested enough energy in making high-quality Vista drivers in time for launch. They had approximately a full year of Betas, the same time that ATI and Intel had. The Vista Beta and RC programs had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, for which Microsoft collected crash dump data (which is the same type of data mentioned in this article, collected BEFORE launch). Yet even with this time, and the user crash dump reports, clearly by launch in January 2007 nVidia still wasn't ready with robust drivers.
The evidence here really does point at nVidia, no matter how much you want it to point at Microsoft.
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:4, Insightful)