Nvidia being sued for poor Vista drivers!

First I heard of it, but it looks like Nvidia are being sued for their poor drivers marring Vistas reputation of stability and reliability sometime last year.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.html

Here's a chart that shows how bad it is:



Some other interesting tidbits there too in linked articles.

Edit: Actualy looks like the title isn't accurate, Microsoft is being sued over the issue of some "Vista capable" machines not actually being Vista capable. The issue of the Nvidia drivers is something that Microsoft is using in their defense.

Unknown? Probably microsoft too ;o) It is still a big chunk for microsoft though. Doesn't excuse nVidia though.

o.O

If they're suing Nvidia, they're going to have ATI crucified.

'Unknown'? Does that mean they have no idea what's the cause of 17% of crashes? o_O

Great statistic, sum = 100.3%

Hehe

One reason why I downgraded to XP... :)

Talk about the kettle and the pot.

I wonder how many companies whose software no longer works properly could sue MS for providing a "bad" OS.

heh - they prolly rounded up to the nearest 10th.

Probably none, given that their software would have worked had they written it properly in the first place. Companies had at least a year prior to Vista being launched to get their drivers sorted. Two years down the line and some of them still haven't done it. Whose fault is that?

I've never had trouble with Nvidia's drivers. ATI, on the other hand, makes me want to strangle everyone at AMD and ATI.

Except as you can see from the pie chart, ATi drivers are 3 times less likely to crash.

No. It means that a report was submitted for an application that wasn't digitally signed. BlitzMAX and (most) games developed with it, would fall into this category.

Microsofts. As you can see, Microsoft applications are scoring fairly high on the chart themselves, only scoring slightly better than every other major software developer in the world combined.

I mean if the people who wrote the OS only get it right 4 out of 5 times, what chance do people who don't have access to all the internal documentation have?

I do think it's funny how they're using nVidia's poor score in their defense. Our OS wasn't rushed (and our marketing department didn't flat out lie), because one of the worlds leading hardware manufacturers can't write decent drivers for it, if their lives depended on it.

I mean what kind of backwards reasoning is that? The company who has been championed as the best provider of graphics card drivers for Linux, bar none is getting slaughtered on Vista? Excellent way to rationalize that Vista isn't crap.

A driver has to start first before it can crash ;)

lol

Don't forget this pie chart doesn't take into account how many use nVidia and ATI...

its interesting that ATI is that low.

Has this to do with the fact that they didn't work at all for a very long time so no ati user used Vista or what? And that they didn't work anywhere near acceptable till catalyst 8 when it came to OpenGL.

and I don't think that it is NVIDIAs fault that MS was to stupid to implement the WDDM handling before the last beta release till Vista went into Release Candidates. Trying to use driver problems from teams outside of MS due to that is a really lame strategy and something normally only Apple and Creative use at Court to save their asses.

And yes the vista capable stuff is something MS must be sued over! My Tablet (IBM X41t) has this as well. It has an Intel GMA900, 1GB of RAM and a 1.5Ghz Pentium-M ULV!
Thanks to Vistas totally broken resource and process management this performs that bad that sometimes clicking on a window to reactivate it means 30 seconds of waiting till the system gets responsive again and the like.
Vista + Single Core is NOT vista capable and if I could I would force them to pay back what the tablet + hardware cost to replace it with a Dual Core Tablet!!

PS: Unknown especially means Creative + X-Fi and the like which didn't have any vista drivers for month.

PPS: NVIDIA hardly were able to hurt the reputation of an OS that was just incompatible and broken ... how, the stuff would first have needed to run at all to be able to crash ;-) (above that, NVIDIA run better under DX10 than ATIs ... so I would guess that ATI should be sued for not having been able to give any acceptable DX10 performance till late 07)

> Except as you can see from the pie chart, ATi drivers are 3 times less likely to crash.

> Don't forget this pie chart doesn't take into account how many use nVidia and ATI...


I read a news article on this - the stats do not take into consideration the difference in usage between ATI and Nvidia cards. It only lists the the number attributable toe each.

So the question is how many NVIDIA cards are there in vista systems, versus ATI in vista. Then of those how many are able to trace the problem back to the card if it was the card or driver that was the problem.

I have NVidia and I have not had Vista crash on me once. I have had applications crash on me, but I haven't notice any more crashing than what did on XP (with the exception of a few that are so old, they don't seem to like Vista to begin with, which has nothing to do with NVidia.)

Anyone else find it interesting that Microsoft themselves produce the 2nd most crashes?

Edit:
Duh, lots of people, evidently.

In my mind, Microsoft deserves a lot more of the blame than NVidia.

Ok, so nvidia's drivers presumably are crap.
OK, nvidia's drivers presumably crash.
But WHY is that crash capable of taking out the entire OS in the process?!

The fact that a bad driver can still crash the entire system is 100% microsoft's fault. No matter how badly a program behaves, it should be able to crash anything other than itself (After which the OS would presumably lose communications with it, and could initiate a re-initialization of the driver in question)

That's just great, a company crashing its own product.


LOL!

EDIT:

Drivers is one reason I never upgraded.

I thought that was supposed to be one of the things Vista would improve. Traditionally, graphics drivers were a major source of crashes. They were allowed direct access to hardware in the interest of maximum speed. This meant they could indeed crash the entire system and the OS was unable to prevent it.

On the other hand, Microsoft have always bent over backwards to accomodate misbehaving programs. Windows contains a staggering amount of code to work around known bugs in major applications. This benefits users in the short term. Their programs work. But over the years the OS becomes a creaking mass of unmaintainable hacks.

I think at some point they have to say enough is enough and start fresh, like Apple did.

That was the original plan for Vista by running applications within sand boxes and only allowed managed code to run natively ...
But this will have to wait for Windows 7 ...
While the idea is nice, MS wants to use their own base, not to use Unix and add a modified version of something else on top like Apple did.

As well, MS knows exactly that they have the market shared they are having now because they maintain backward compatibility unlike apple who lived and still lives in a niche and survives due to that.

MS would have to face strongly raising Apple and potentially even Tuxi Marketshares if they dropped backward compatibility completely like Apple does with every second major version of OSX

Which is unlikely to happen: Microsoft lost the mindshare of too many people over the years. the main reason for their domineering market share is because of lock-in. You use MS because you have applications that require it.

Now, if Microsoft scraps their entire product and comes up with an brand spanking new one that is not backwards compatible with all their tangled mess of old API's, there is no legacy software holding you back, and no more lock-in. a completely new MS OS without backwards compatibility means a great opportunity for people to jump ship to Apple or Linux as well -- After all, they're starting anew there as well. MS will do everything in their power to keep people locked in. (legal as well as not-so-legal as numerous court cases clearly display)

On the same line: Intel designed their Itanium line of chips -- a brand new 64-bit system, without 32-bit backwards compatibility. Arguably superior to AMD's x64 extensions which DID allow old 32-bit programs to run as well.
The end result? Intel wasting a billion dollars on their itanium line, and quietly implementing AMD's x64 extensions in their Pentium-D and Core 2 lines of chips.

Backwards compatibility truly is both a blessing and a curse at the same time.

Perhaps they should...

If MS could use their inside knowlage to create a working stable version of a windows kernel that could run on a nix platform, seamlessly like Wine's compatability layer does (but one that works well), then they could still start fresh, with a spanking new unix based system and contain the entire legacy within a seamless emulation layer or slave kernel.

UNIX is the "big daddy" OS whose legacy spawned generations of new and improved ideas, the Windows legacy is like a huge turd that wont flush, blocking the innovation pipe.
It simply had better standards for the way it works from the start. MSs kernels from inception have been inferior in critical areas like reliability, stability, in later versions multitasking, task management, networking and proper file permissions (non existant in windows - UAC in vista is actually their first serious attempt at a "workaround" for this old problem).

Unix Spawned: LINUX, Solaris, OSX, BSD, AIX, HP-UX, UltriX, etc...............
DOS/Windows Spawned: ..Windows. (& A few incomplete opensource compatability layers made & maintained by people desparate to break away from it!)

If you cant beat them (performance wise, rather than with the not-so-bottomless wallet) then perhaps its time to join them.

But doing so would admit that *NIX is a viable platform, and better than the current microsoft one at that or they wouldn't even consider switching to it.

MS acknowledging that Linux/unix isn't just a toy would be the most damning anti-windows statement they could possibly make. Keep in mind: Microsoft is a marketing company first, and a technology company second. Even if a *NIX-based port of Windows were the best thing for them to do from a technological point of view, essentially switching would be the same as admitting defeat -- by a toy, of all things.

It'll never happen.

Lol :D very true, would be nice though wouldnt it. Anyway, however they explain how a "toy" is controlling the vast majority of the worlds servers, the oil, aviation, car and defense industries not to mention gaining serious ground in the thin client desktop arena, ill never know.
(basically everywhere they need secure and reliable computers)

That opinion alone makes them looks stupid (although Mr Balmer does a good job of that already ;).

It's not windows that's stopping innovation it's MS and there lawsuits.

True, them and their lawyers backed up the loo. Prehaps a good hard plunger-ing in the form of another AT suit would get things moving again.

:D

If only they could open the doors a bit (not completely, just enough), so people could actually help indirectly improve it.

Why not. After all thats what MS have been doing to there customers for years :D

<handwave class="jedi">This is not the operating system you're looking for</handwave>

Anyway: Microsoft's 'solution' to this is pretty simple: if you don't like the numbers, just make up new ones that make you look better.

They launched a "get the facts" campaign with acompanying roadshow, where they were actually traveling around with a big truck educating the public about the evils of open source and the vastly superior microsoft way.

http://catb.org/~esr/halloween/halloween11.html

Among others they were claiming that running linux was ten times as expensive as running Windows.

No, I'm serious.

Really.

http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3414651



What I find absolutely astounding is this: Microsoft keeps claiming that the free software is a lot more expensive than the microsoft solution, mostly because of all the extra training involved. (I don't know about you, but few companies I've come across actually do any formal training on things like office suites anymore)
However: Even if you already have a Microsoft Office background, the latest version of OpenOffice is actually a lot EASIER for those people to pick up than the latest version of Microsoft Office, thanks to the radical redesign and departure from their long-standing menu structure... But not a peep about training there, of course.

Thats because they want people to PAY for on of their training courses books........I'm in shock they are acctually doing free self-paced courses as well on line....

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/FX100565001033.aspx