30% of Vista crashes caused by nVidia

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JamesL

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Microsoft's data strongly indicates that the problems were real. According to documentation on page 47 of the PDF, NVIDIA drivers were the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft's own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the "Unknown" category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).
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I thought that was pretty interesting..
I've only owned an ATI gpu, running on XP Pro, and I thought ATI had driver issues... but it seems like nVidia has problems of their own... (they topped microsoft in this category for heavens sake.. although it's probably a little biased)
What are your experiences with nVidia & ATI drivers?
Care to discuss?
 
I have Vista 64bit and HD2900XT for 10 months and I didnt have any problems with drivers :).

 
Odd, I've only had a display driver crash once in my life, and it was on a mobile GPU which has little support anyway.
 
Common things happen most commonly.......Vista isn't that stable, most people have nvidia GPU's.....the trees are in the forest.....go figure.:D
 
Hmm.. when I first installed the stock driver CD for my ATI card, for the weirdest reason, a lot of the yellow links on [H]... and [H] only, were turning out a light shade of blue. It would revert back to yellow if I highlighted it, and back to blue, sometime or another.
I downloaded the latest ATI drivers a couple weeks later... loading screen for games lagged like heck, and gave me artifacts... gameplay was fine though, once I got past the menu screen. Anyways, i re-installed the driver from the CD, and no more blue text on [H], loading screens are still laggy extremely laggy, but game performance is smooth..
I think I'll try re-installing a couple more times, and see if it changes anything, cause it seems to change every time I re-install a driver.
 
With the early drivers I would every so often get the "Your video card device has failed and has been restarted" which completely screwed everything up and required a reboot. A couple of updates and I never saw that again.

I did install the new drivers that came out recently, and I don't know if it's because of the drivers or because of an MMO (Cabal Online) I've kept open while at work, but I've come back to a black screen two days in a row and on reboot was welcomed to the "your system crashed, it was a blue screen" windows error log thing. It could be the game, the drivers, or a combo of the two.

Vista isn't that stable, most people have nvidia GPU's
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Not sure where you get that. From my experience, at least, Vista itself is very stable, having only run into issues with 3rd party devices. There's something up with Nvidia's Vista support, their drivers have serious issues with a handful of games in Vista (and I say it's Nvidia's problem and not Microsoft because ATi users don't have the same issues with Vista and the games I'm speaking of!)
 
magoo said:
.......Vista isn't that stable.....
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That couldnt be farther from the truth. Ive been running it for well over a year and it runs Flawlessly on both my mobile 7900gt and my 7900gs in my desktop rig.

People who think they are computer "savvy" are typically the ones that have the most problems.....do you fall in that category?
 
Of course they do... cause the tech savvy's are more or less the power users, and can't help but keep their hands off the latest beta releases, software/driver tweaks, hardware mods, etc...
 
nvidia had bad Vista video drivers from the end of 2006 through the first quarter of 2007. I'm not sure how good/bad the chipset platform drivers are/were, but those probably also contributed to the number of nvidia driver crashes.

ars said:
The data points in the table cover an unspecified period in 2007, and Microsoft makes no attempt to break the aggregate data down into which device drivers, specifically, returned the highest number of crashes. If the number of failures were split by month and then graphed, we'd presumably see the number of NVIDIA driver failures per month decreasing as the company slowly brought its driver issues under control.
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I had 2 nvidia driver crashes that were overclocking related when I was setting up my 8800GS this month. I didn't have a G8x series card until last October, but I can't recall any crashes from that time until now besides the 2 mentioned above. I do remember some people complaining about G8x drivers throughout last year though. Maybe this will shame nvidia into not releasing half-baked drivers anymore.
----

And yeah, I have to agree with Lamont Cranston above. Vista has been very stable for me on various systems over the last year. XP wasn't bad, but Vista is even more stable.
 
Nvidia's drivers are absolute garbage. In a few months of having 8800 g92 cards, I've had probably 5x as many crashes/issues as I did in two years of use of an X1900xtx. A small selection of problems:

-can't use AA in oblivion NO MATTER WHAT, tried probably 20 different drivers between vista/xp and they all crash
-can't use SLI in oblivion. when enabled in XP oblivion crashes on startup. in vista I can get into the game but it crashes after a minute or so
-world in conflict always crashes about 3 minutes in with XP. works fine in vista
-bioshock crashes with AA on in vista, doesn't matter if it's DX9 or DX10 mode. works fine in XP.
-blazing angels 2 won't use my native monitor in XP, it will in vista

These are just a small selection of the problems. I'd say probably half of my games have similar annoying things and I have to keep my installs scattered out over XP and vista just to get semi full useability. Drivers are all cleaned/installed properly and it's not a hardware failure, Nvidia's drivers just blow.

I will do this article one better: I've had over 100 crashes in vista and EVERY SINGLE ONE has been due either to CPU overclock testing (obviously my fault), or Nvidia drivers not being able to run games on my GTS 512 SLI setup at the same settings as a 2 year old ATI card. On the plus side, Crysis runs with ridiculous framerates and ridiculous settings, crash free.
 
My last Ati was the worse experiance of my life. complete driver failure on a regular basis. its been around for 2 years and ati has done nothing to fix it. There was no ryhme or reason for it. Installed 2 different ati cards on 2 different systems that were plagued with it. Switched out multiple pieces of hardware, reinstalled windows, bought a 1950 xt to replace the X800 that replaced the 9800, all cards were plagued by it on two different machines.

the only remedy? Run drivers that were almost 2 years old. ya way to go ati.
 
For "for the entirely of 2007", there were allot more nVidia cards being used, than ATI's.

I think the graph reflects that, and that driver improvements still need to be made too.

I hope the "Vista Capable" lawsuit keeps nVidia on their toes, making us higher quality drivers... ;)
Speedy to be more direct!
 
I've been running Vista since August 2007 and have only had one crash of any kind on my system...an nVidia driver failure. I run all WHQL drivers, except that one time, when I was using the beta drivers suggested to get BioShock to play correctly. Since the followup official release I haven't had any issues, between my 7900GS, 8600GTS, G92 8800GTS between my 2 PC's (upgrade in one obviously)
 
JamesL said:
Of course they do... cause the tech savvy's are more or less the power users, and can't help but keep their hands off the latest beta releases, software/driver tweaks, hardware mods, etc...
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QFT
ATi has "in their flavor" less user base/late to the DirectX10 game/Vista tweaked somewhat when the R600 was released. That would reflect in the results.
 
Lamont Cranston said:
That couldnt be farther from the truth. Ive been running it for well over a year and it runs Flawlessly on both my mobile 7900gt and my 7900gs in my desktop rig.

People who think they are computer "savvy" are typically the ones that have the most problems.....do you fall in that category?
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I am not "one of those"......if Vista was the "thing" why on earth would XP and XP Pro still be used at all???? I only use it for gaming due to no triple-SLi support in XP, if XP had support I doubt I'd use Vista at all. I see no distinct advantage over XP excepting some DX10 effects. I had considerable problems with STALKER, Bioshock,and some Valve games in Vista. Over time these have improved.

I have Vista Home Premium 64 bit running on my computer with nvidia 8800 GTX in Triple-Sli and have had no problems what so ever since I started Triple-SLi. I use Beta drivers all the time.
My observation is purely one of common sense......in 2007 Vista was new and was unfamiliar to mant users. nvidia is by and away the GPU of choice in most computers and therefore would follow that logic that problems would occur.
It does not excuse either party.
 
2 BSOD caused by nvidia and counting here.. :(

Maybe I'll switch back to XP if this keeps up.
 
Lamont Cranston said:
That couldnt be farther from the truth. Ive been running it for well over a year and it runs Flawlessly on both my mobile 7900gt and my 7900gs in my desktop rig.

People who think they are computer "savvy" are typically the ones that have the most problems.....do you fall in that category?
Click to expand...

My experiences agree with you, too. Vista has been very stable for me. In fact, when I ran into a BSOD issue with Oblivion and WinXP, I simply copied my Oblivion folder over to my Vista Oblivion folder, overwrote everything, booted up Vista, and no more BSOD or CTDs.
 
magoo said:
......if Vista was the "thing" why on earth would XP and XP Pro still be used at all????
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The same reason there are still millions of 98 and ME boxes out there - people become used to what they have and how to do things a certain way - 99.9% of people hate change

Money - most people think they should be able to treat a computer like they do a tv - buy one every 10 years and expect it to work flawlessly the whole time so they dont have to buy a new one or upgrade it.

Lack of 3rd party support - while its getting better its not what it should be. Im gonna laugh my ass off when Windows 7 comes out and this happens all over again.

because people for some reason dont hold companies responsible when things arent right, rather they just piss and moan and go on about their daily routine dealing with the problem rather than doing what is necessary to fix it.
 
The early Nvidia drivers were absolute garbage. Very buggy and slow and they didn't even have SLI support. I believe they are one of the biggest reasons Vista has such a negative reputation.
 
I can certainly believe that article, the reason you see a 3870x2 in my sig is because of nvidias drivers, constantly causing fsx to crash.
 
Nivida driver installed w/ vista and running for more than one year. So far no crash. (knock on wood)
 
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