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."
Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Interesting)
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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 [slashdot.org]
Re:MOD PARENT DOWN (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
Re:Time to open up those drivers NVIDIA (Score:4, Insightful)
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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>
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Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Oh....wait.
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Hey, at least we got through to them.
WARNING - Shock site (Score:4, Funny)
Re:WARNING - Shock site (Score:5, Funny)
Not surprised (Score:2, 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:Not surprised (Score:4, Insightful)
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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
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Minimal problems with 169 series (Score:2)
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: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...
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The linux drivers for nvidia suck too
Really? I haven't had the same experience. I was very impressed last week as I plugged my box into my HDTV. As X booted (which was configured for the wrong resolution of my normal monitor) the NVidia logo splashed on my screen, spun around for a second and then X loaded at the perfect 1920x1080 resolution.
I've never seen any driver for Linux adjust the resolution on the fly, I've always had to change values around in Xorg.conf, but NVidia did it.
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I was very impre
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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
Not for me! (Score:2)
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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.
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The automatic adjustment was probably not caused by the driver.
Looking at nvidia-drivers README
It's always good to RTFM
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YMMW!
What is the standard procedure? (Score:2)
I'm seriously puzzled why and how device drivers can cause such major issues in Windows but seldom in Linux (identical hardware, mind).
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:What is the standard procedure? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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).
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Huh? (Score:3, Funny)
Huh? (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
The part that seems to have been missed is the fact that Microsoft had 17.9% of the crashes related to their own drivers. IMO this is much more significant and interesting than Nvidia beta drivers crashing and should be the real news here.
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.
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They may be more stable to the user, but in terms of actually programming for them.. yikes. You look at them funny and you lose your whole opengl context or start running a 1 frame/hour. Nvidia's drivers are much more likely to either a) work or b) tell you why they didn't.
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That being said... in the graphics world there are effectively 3 main players, nVidia, ATI, and Intel. I think it would be a good idea in the future for Microsoft to ensure those companies have everything they need to get there cards working properly pre-launch of a new OS... particularly pre-launch of a new OS that includes heavy use of grap
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Interesting)
When a third party is writing the drivers, you don't want them to have access to anything proprietary and so the interfaces need to be very thoroughly documented because the external team isn't allowed to have access to the implementation details at all. A lot of the early XFree86 accelerated drivers were developed in this way and, at the time, were a lot more stable than their Windows counterparts, as were the early Radeon drivers written by the open source community.
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O RLY? (Score:3, Interesting)
I remember when the first nForce3 drivers came out that had those IDE problems. And the continuing problem with the SW drivers. Man, I thought something was seriously wrong with my new rig. Nope, just the drivers....
Re:O RLY? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, this wouldn't be the first time Nvidia drivers are responsible for instability.
At 28.8%, nVidia still has a long way to go to reach the epitome of device driver excellence that is ATI's collection of video drivers. Those extrusions of fecal material have accounted for more cases of alopecia on users than most other kinds of software. I'm actually surprised that the submitter didn't take a swipe at ATI while writing about driver crashes; the urge to do that must've been immense. In fact, ATI driver problems where the single biggest contributor to Jerry Pournelle's best writing ever in Byte Magazine's Chaos Manor column.
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Any time I installed an ATI card I half expected it to ask if I wanted to double down befo
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Re: I remember Trident fondly (Score:2)
Of course, there were many "inexplicable" crashes in our environment during the Win9x / NT4 era (blue screen or freeze without a corresponding crash dump file), so who knows. We assumed those were from faulty IDE/SCSI/RAID drivers or hardware, since no crash dump was written to disk. But that was rea
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.
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> systems would never work or just were not ready for Vista.
I can assure you, having worked in a place which designs cards and writes drivers for Windows, that the release of a new Microsoft OS is not met with whoops and `alrights` etc. It marks the start of another tedious cycle of testing, fixing and dealing with customer problems. People want to be able to plug in
nVidia Drivers are not the issue (Score:2)
First, given the popularity of some of their chip sets, this probably isn't bad. Quite a few systems out there with the 6100 and 6150 UMA chipsets. And what about the other 71.2 %
Could be the UMA in Vista is unstable? I am using a 8500 GT and I haven't crashed once. No UMA in use though. I question those running UMA for Video on Vista, Vista needs a beefy video.
I do have slow disks, slow network I/O and slow... but no video issues. And the best part is that it also works with Linux/Solaris. (8500GT).
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Agreed (Score:2)
They've gotten far better now at least, but they (Nvidia) really dropped the b
It's not just NVIDIA having problems (Score:2)
Nothing new here (Score:3, Informative)
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I'm relieved (Score:5, Interesting)
Well then it's a good thing their driver support is so crappy with Linux!
Oh wait...
More seriously, I rag on Nvidea for poor Linux support, and this is more of a chance to bash them, but their drivers work fine under XP. If Microsoft provided better documentation of their APIs, as the EU has been demanding, perhaps writing drivers wouldn't be such a pain in the ass?
I also wonder why closed source vendors don't open their code. They don't have to release it under the GPL, they can reatain all their copyrights, just publish the source. How could it hurt them? They retain copyrights and presumably patents so it's not like anyone could copy them.
Is closed source closed so that nobody will realise just how abysmally shitty their kludges are?
If your OS crashes, your OS is crap. Microsoft, fix your OS and publish the code. Nvidea, fix your shitty drivers and open the code. Don't give up any rights, just open it.
I'd like to see copyright law changed so that executables can't be copyrighted unless the source is also provided. How can IBM tell what parts of their code they stole from SCO? Of course the answer was "none". Time to reboot copyright law!
-mcgrew
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Especially since at one time it got so bad it wouldn't reach Windows at all (but Linux ran fine) and reinstalling Windows fixed the problem.
Hmm....
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Re:I'm relieved (Score:4, Insightful)
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More seriously, I rag on Nvidea for poor Linux support, and this is more of a chance to bash them, but their drivers work fine under XP.
Poor Linux support?
With my nVidia Geforce 8400 in my Linux laptop:
* Both GPU and CPU clocks are dynamic (Powermizer enabled) and I can see those clocks and temperature on my desktop using a applet.
* I never had problems with openGL games.
* I'm running compiz very smoothly.
* I use nvidia-settings for easily changing twin-view (screen layout) settings on the fly.
* I can use my laptop video hotkey for changing the screen layout automatically.
* I can suspend (to memory) my laptop.
* I never had a nvidia related
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.
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#1 is a sort of recursive problem as the suppliers are not allowing the code to be released for the same reason. Most likely it circles right around into a loop so it is impossible for anybody to make a decision to allow code to be published. For others saying they should print the stuff they can, I think the amount of work needed to extract the code they own is very significant, also the result will not compile or work, which will probably defeat most advantages of ha
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But the law should state that binaries should not be able to be copyrighted unless the source code is open. Nobody would lose except bad coders and bad companies (which is unfortunately almost all of them).
I'm guessing that before that happens pigs will fly.
The rest were caused by ATI. (Score:2, Interesting)
I dropped Windows completely and went with Ubuntu Linux. It has issues with video cards too, but aside from not being able to enable some eye-candy- it almost never crashes. (Usually the only time it does is when I try to tweak video settings
Certified (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Certified (Score:5, Insightful)
If they didn't, its partly because they took the blame, as they should.
How about Nouveau ? (Score:3, Funny)
28.8% of Crashes.. (Score:2)
Not the whole story... (Score:2)
I would wake up each morning to find my computer constantly rebooting. It would blue screen and I couldn't even make out the error before it was off the scree
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don't know why MS still insists on distributing broken drivers after years of complaints
I'll vouch for this (Score:5, Interesting)
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No such problems for me (Score:5, Funny)
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Upgrade to Lear Siegler ADM3A on your serial port - at least you will have a half functional screen!
Warning: Unix not included.
I'm not buying all of this (Score:2)
When I had Acer laptops with their crappy ATI graphics, OpenGL never worked. I had 3-d modeling programs that only worked in 2 dimensions. It didn't matter what ATI driver you had. You could only spin the objects in the x and y dimensions. Ubuntu's ATI drivers never worked either on the Acer laptops.
Now with Nvidia, I get tr
It's a cultural problem... (Score:3, Insightful)
Linux users unite! (Score:5, Funny)
What makes me wonder... (Score:3, Informative)
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:What makes me wonder... (Score:4, Informative)
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
The other 83.7% .... (Score:5, Funny)
These statistics were calculated using Excel.
Not my experience (Score:3)
Maybe some of these crashes are caused by the flaky motherboards and memory that the drivers run on, or power supplies, and it's just that code in those drivers is what pushes the hardware to the max and makes it crash.
I once bumped into an NVidea driver engineer (Score:3, Interesting)
About a year ago, my college had an alumni breakfast in Silicon Valley. One of my fellow alumni proudly exclaimed that he worked for NVidea writing drivers.
When asked about Vista, he told us how Microsoft was "sooo understanding" about letting them ship drivers before they were complete. I bit my tounge and decided to stay away from Vista.
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Anyway to the point is that one of Microsoft's biggest concerns should have been compatibility with existing hardware, to make it easier on vendors to update/convert/create drivers with little fuss, and it seems they did little. I'd have to imagine their big code redux 2 years or so before release certainly didn
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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.
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(another reason to be grateful for slysoft... just wish they would develop a full-featured DRM-free media player that worked perfectly out of any output/input and supported any HD content and integrated AnyDVD HD and Clone DVD/Clone CD as needed. I would pay for it too!)
Too bad technical specifics have not been leak