That huge bundle of
damning emails and documents Microsoft produced as part of the
Vista-capable lawsuit is full of fascinating information about how the company developed, planned, and launched Vista, but the latest juicy nugget to come out if it suggests that a lot of problems faced by the troubled operating system are actually NVIDIA's fault -- nearly 30% of logged Vista crashes were due to NVIDIA driver problems, according to Microsoft data included in the bundle. That's some 479,326 hung systems, if you're keeping score at home, and it's in first place by a large margin -- Microsoft clocks in at number two at 17.9 percent, and ATI is fourth with 9.3 percent. Now, the chart doesn't contain a ton of additional information that would help put it in context -- a specific time period in 2007 would be nice, as would and driver and OS versions -- but we've been hearing about NVIDIA issues with Vista from the start, and this seems to confirm it. So that's pressure by Intel to support incompatible chipsets, outrage by Dell and Wal-Mart that the Vista Capable program was confusing customers, Microsoft executives saying they had been
"personally burnt" by Vista, and now what looks like a huge NVIDIA driver problem -- who knows what else is going to come out of this lawsuit? At this point we're half expecting a photo of Gates signing a Save XP petition.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Nick Krewson @ Mar 27th 2008 7:45PM
How strange, and most of my Vista crashes (what few there were due to graphics issues) were caused by my ATI Radeon x1650xt. That's why I switched to Nvidia in fact.
My 8800gt Alpha Dog has only crashed once, and that was because it overheated trying to give birth to the ice level in Crysis.
Stupid Crysis.
Rafer @ Mar 27th 2008 7:49PM
I havnt had one in a while but the last 3 blue screens I had was all Nvidia Drivers. Still wouldn't give my 7800GTX for anything. Love that bad boy.
Rafer @ Mar 27th 2008 7:49PM
And yes it plays Crysis.
billy bob thorton @ Mar 27th 2008 8:33PM
I love it when people who don't know what they are talking about like to get the masses all up in arms. Claiming that XP is superior is just plain wrong. It's faster if you're still using 5 year old apps and 5 year old hardware. Vista run on proper hardware runs flawlessly. In fairness I have 8GB of ram but it handles the resources properly and doesn't hang. Sometimes a program will crap out but that happens all day long on my Mac Pro as well (both Abode and Apple apps)
Vista is like Leopard. You can't expect to run it on older hardware. With up to date hardware they are both very pleasant to use. We have a mini (core duo 1gb) and the leopard experience is terrible just like Vista is on a "vista capable" system with 512mb of ram, shared video memory and a celeron processor. Yea, we actually have one of those at work. I have a P3 500 with 256mb ram I just setup with Xp that runs nearly as fast as that Celeron with Vista.
It's about the hardware people.
wickedpheonix @ Mar 27th 2008 9:11PM
@ billy bob thorton
It is NOT just hardware. I built myself a quad-core with an 8800 Ultra and put Ultimate x64 on it. I was getting so many crashes in games that I almost replaced my memory, sound card (X-Fi), and video card (in that order) - not only do the nVidia drivers crash when the Ultra is put under ANY kind of load (read: only being able to game at 1024x768 on a 1920x1200 display SUCKS), but the X-Fi drivers can not switch between normal line-in mic and "what you hear" recording without rebooting, AND there are severe, documented problems with having an X-Fi and 4GB+ RAM in your system.
Got fed up with it after about 2 weeks of constant problems, installed XP and I have zero reason to go back to Vista (which wouldn't even activate for a couple days after I reformatted!) - Crysis plays at 1920x1200 with the DX10 config hack at 40+ FPS - no real image quality difference, and no problems either.
Vista has REAL driver problems. Oh yeah - I had a 4-year old Dell laptop running Vista Ultimate with no problems other than the fact that it was slow, so it is drivers, not the age of the hardware you are using.
Patuxentbball @ Mar 27th 2008 9:20PM
@wicked pheonix
obviously, you suck at building and configuring computers if that is your story. Your story sounds like one of those where the person never ACTUALLY used Vista and is just hopping on the Vista Sucks bandwagon. Are you using XP x64? if not than how can you compare a 64 bit to a 32bit OS, driver issues exist on all x64 systems.
Jeremy @ Mar 27th 2008 9:40PM
@billy bob thorton
I'm glad to see someone is the voice of reason. If people have nothing better to do than to badmouth an operating system they are giant losers. If it doesn't work for you, then don't use it. People who adopted early on and expected things to work perfectly are out of their minds. I have had no issues and find it to be an overall much better experience than XP (not 100% perfect, but nothing in life is).
Others have said it, but it bears repeating. Whoever wrote this article is obviously a biased fanboi. Maybe instead of jumping on the bandwagon and taking a jab at Vista commenting on Bill Gates signing some petition to save XP why don't you stop for 14 seconds and realize that nVidia has a HUGE customer base and are most likely to see the most problems. You are misleading people in propagating this report without putting a disclaimer that states this.
Cerebrate @ Mar 27th 2008 10:19PM
You forgot to implement market share of nvidia, ati, and intel. If ati has 1/3 the market share of nvidia, that means they have the same failure rate. This also means that intel probably has the lowest failure rate, as they probably have twice as much of their chipsets on the market than nvidia or ati. (One has to remember they make the whole motherboard too, mostly for laptops). Because of that, they would only account for 1/2 of what they currently account for, or however much they have more than nvidia.
Iain @ Mar 27th 2008 10:33PM
@billy bob: XP isn't just faster on 5-year-old hardware, it's faster on all hardware including current stuff.
It's designed to work on older hardware, so on new stuff, it's even faster.
@Patuxentbball: I use XP x64 and have never had a single driver issue, so maybe you shouldn't go making sweeping statements like that.
Iain @ Mar 27th 2008 10:45PM
@Cerebrate: even if what you say about Intel producing more graphics chips than ATi or nVidia is true, this is Vista we're talking about - how many people do you think are trying to run it without a proper graphics card?
Garst @ Mar 28th 2008 2:12AM
I haven't had any problems with my ATi vid card crashing Vista; neither the old or new card. I've only had to reinstall the driver when I put in SP1, but there was nothing that could be considered a crash.
LC @ Mar 27th 2008 7:45PM
Considering my nVidia drivers ( 169.25, and 169.44 ) crash all the time, I wouldn't doubt it.
Dualboot @ Mar 27th 2008 8:07PM
My Vista box regularly crashes on the Nvidia drivers. It even tells me the driver died, tried to restart, but after a few flickering screens I get a blue screen.
I'm still trying to find words to describe what WHQL really means, but I'm only coming up with four-lettered ones...
BigD145 @ Mar 27th 2008 11:10PM
You're using BETA drivers and bitching about crashes?
JohnTitor @ Mar 27th 2008 7:45PM
Why not mix all others and unknown?
Andir3.0 @ Mar 27th 2008 7:51PM
Because Unknown is all those that Microsoft hasn't found a vendor to blame yet?
No, but really. I heard about tons of crashes in Vista and people blaming drivers and whatnot, but you suggest Linux to them and they cry about how their hardware doesn't work with it... circular arguments!
Sorry, just a bit peeved right now.
FTY @ Mar 27th 2008 8:00PM
You know the thing is, the nvidia drivers crash all the time when the GPU is under stress (mostly while gaming), when I do everything else, not a single crash. This alone eliminates why I should switch to Linux, as with Linux an onboard GPU is sufficent as nothing viable runs on the OS anyway.
stunta @ Mar 27th 2008 8:00PM
"All others" are known culprits but so spread out that listing them individually would make the pie chart unreadable. "Unknown" means the culprit was not identified - most likely because the software was not digitally signed.
linuxamp @ Mar 27th 2008 11:51PM
I think 'unknown' should fall under 'microsoft' until it is proven otherwise.
LordZargon @ Mar 27th 2008 7:45PM
My NVidia 8800 runs Crysis in FULL on Vista 64-bit and I've never had ONE, SINGLE hang.
Sucks to be anyone with card of fail!
Iain @ Mar 27th 2008 7:45PM
The numbers mean nothing without more information.
For a start, what proportion of users included in this graph have nVidia cards and what proportion have ATi cards?
Totalfixation @ Mar 27th 2008 8:24PM
That was what i was thinking, Nvidia is the dominate one in the market. More than likely they have a larger user base. If the stats showed ratio wise than it's a different story.
Rupert @ Mar 29th 2008 11:57AM
ZDNet rips this article apart for the lack of detail.
http://blogs.zdnet.com/hardware/?p=1633
shawnmos @ Mar 27th 2008 7:46PM
Yeah, I saw this when those documents were first released. Funny stuff.
ClaMs @ Mar 28th 2008 5:36AM
Killer Avatar dude! :D
shawnmos @ Mar 28th 2008 8:37AM
thanks. I made it myself.
Carl Vitullo @ Mar 27th 2008 7:49PM
This all means nothing out of context, of course.
if 95% of users had an nvidia graphics card, this could be anticipated.
If everyone with an nvidia card built their own system and is an idiot who got the wrong drivers, that would be a low percentage
FTY @ Mar 27th 2008 7:52PM
That's actually true. I get "Display driver stopped working and was restarted" quite often when playing games, the screen starts blinking and I know it's time to CTRL+ALT+DEL and terminate the application (game). The error box says, that the driver was restarted successfully, however when I try to run a 3D app, it goes back to flickering. So when I get the "dripslay driver stopped working" thing, I just terminate the game and restart the PC.
It's hugely annoying, but this is the only problem I have to complain about with Vista, and as the news says, it's probably nvidias fault (8800 Ultra).
darkstar @ Mar 27th 2008 7:53PM
my nvidia crashed too till i got the latest driver. strangely... theres a white line across my lcd whenever i play videos though. no white lines if im writing emails or play with the ps3 on the lcd.
Sizer @ Mar 27th 2008 7:55PM
Same documents revealed that MS made huge sweeping driver model changes just before Vista was released (which is why almost nobody had drivers ready at launch), so along with all the DX10 crud crammed in there that may explain things a bit.
Fail, start to finish.
arteekay @ Mar 27th 2008 11:59PM
"Same documents revealed that MS made huge sweeping driver model changes just before Vista was released (which is why almost nobody had drivers ready at launch), so along with all the DX10 crud crammed in there that may explain things a bit."
Where? You're spouting Creative's nonsense on the audio stack.
"Fail, start to finish."
Agreed, you didn't even try.
Sizer @ Mar 28th 2008 2:15AM
Sigh, okay, I know it's probably pointless to try to reason with a fanboy who comes out swinging so fast, but on the off chance that you just haven't been paying attention and really would like to know, you can easily google for articles such as
http://www.nytimes.com/idg/IDG_002570DE00740E18002573FE006B7266.html?ref=technology
which have come out recently as a result of the Vista capable lawsuit. "Late OS code changes broke drivers and applications, forcing key commodities to miss launch or limp out with issues."
Sizer @ Mar 27th 2008 7:56PM
Same documents revealed that MS made huge sweeping driver model changes just before Vista was released (which is why almost nobody had drivers ready at launch), so along with all the DX10 crud crammed in there that may explain things a bit.
Fail, start to finish.
Sizer @ Mar 27th 2008 7:58PM
And I fail with the double post, sorry!
Balls @ Mar 27th 2008 8:00PM
So 65% of the reason vista fails is due to Nvidia, ATI, Intel and MS.
Wow, that's really really sad.
J L @ Mar 27th 2008 8:03PM
While things could be better, I find it impressive that there are only ~1.5 million logged crashes out of 100 million systems...
(I get a little bubble all the time that says my ATI driver crashed, and recovered. No big deal, other than the screen sometimes goes blank with full screen video.)
J L @ Mar 27th 2008 8:09PM
I want to append something to mine: Did anybody notice how in the post about the Mac Book Air getting hacked, there was not a negative word to be found. But, in the one about Vista crashes, it suggested Bill G. should sign a petition about saving XP. To me, I would rather get a BSOD, instead of being hacked. It would seem the negativity is in the wrong place here.
(Please don't flame me.)
Josh L @ Mar 27th 2008 8:06PM
I would be interested in seeing a further breakdown of the "Microsoft" category. What percentage of that, for example, is caused by the OS itself, or Microsoft's "default" drivers, or other Microsoft apps such as Office or Media Center?
Or is this chart only concerning drivers?
John @ Mar 27th 2008 8:38PM
I think it's just everything, in general. However, NVIDIA would only be causing crashes through drivers.
Bufsabre @ Mar 27th 2008 8:06PM
ive had vista crash once ever ((not counting the beta test that doesnt count cause no one made drivers yet)) and that was because of i installed the wrong lan drivers, so its not even marvells fault
Zach @ Mar 27th 2008 8:20PM
I agree, I've never had a single crash.
Bufsabre @ Mar 27th 2008 10:09PM
try linux
Steffen Jobbs @ Mar 27th 2008 8:36PM
The hack was done on one machine that was allowed to be hacked. BSODs in Vista happen to thousands of machines that are supposed to be relatively free from problems. If it's a NVidia driver problem, then it can be corrected for Vista. Maybe with this Safari hack, Apple can strengthen it's browser security. I don't want BSODs or to get hacked. Both companies should work to avoid any vulnerabilities for users. I still like using WinXP, so I would sign a petition to keep XP running until Windows 7 comes out. What's wrong with that?
synthe @ Mar 27th 2008 8:12PM
i can vouch for this as well, but SP1 has resolved it for me so far. I updated to the latest Nvidia driver after installing SP1 and haven't crashed since.
xemumanic @ Mar 27th 2008 8:14PM
My Nvidia video card (XFX 7900GT) was actually faulty, and if I wasn't running Vista, I would have suffered through so many BSOD's, its not even funny. To illustrate, in Vista, the video driver reset a record 15 times in the span of TWO minutes. This wasn't Vista's fault, or even Nvidia's, at least in the way this article is speaking of, but a physically faulty card.
I would have went ape shit if Vista didn't have the ability to recover in this manner.
Fusion @ Mar 27th 2008 8:19PM
i recently used a friends brand new dell laptop running vista home premium a week ago, as good as VISTA maybe i have never used a new machine as slow, taking ages to do the most basic commands, going back to XP and OSX was a relief
FTY @ Mar 27th 2008 8:25PM
And what has this to do with the article? If you buy crap spec hardware you can't expect things to run good on it. Frankly I bet he had 1GB of RAM in that new notebook and that's basically it. We're writing 2008, RAM is cheap, 2GB should be the minimum these days. For me, anything below 4GB doesn't come in the house, I make exceptions for laptops tho but 2GB is a must there.
Danny @ Mar 27th 2008 9:39PM
@FTY:
Why 2GB? Ubuntu runs fine on 512MB.
There's no reason to get 4GB of RAM, unless you're a gamer.
FTY @ Mar 27th 2008 11:09PM
@Danny
And what can I do with Ubuntu and any other Linux/Unix distro aside of scratching my balls and browsing web, looking at emails and pretending to be unbelievable pro to a win user because I'm useing BitchX/T|X instead of mIRC? Answer that and stay fashionable. Aside of that, even if I would use some emulators like Wine and other stuff, how much RAM would I need to do something serious? Take a wild guess.
People work with their PCs, and work is something that can't be done on a unix box, aside if it's a server and now that I said this, if you have a home PC that sees some usage, Linux/Unix should never run on it, except if you are some kind of fetish guy who like to be deprived of everything useful the software of this planet has to offer.
And no 4GB is not only for gaming, most games don't even care if you have more as 2GB of ram inside, it's other applications that run better like Adobe products, CAD, and stuff.
Andrew @ Mar 28th 2008 6:14AM
Agreed with Danny. I am running the latest Fedora; 8 currently, with an upgrade install from 6 to 7 to 8, like upgrading Windows 98 to Windows XP (then SP1, SP2, SP3), then to Vista, with a P4 1.6GHz, 768MB RAM, and an nVidia card that predates the 6xxx series (Note: I am an ATI fanboy, this was a scavanged card).
My Point? There is NO NEED for more than 1GB RAM unless you are running (GASP) Bloatware crap. I run all the programs I need with it, I have OpenOffice, Firefox, The Gimp, Pidgin (multi-protocol instant messenger), and a hoarde of other programs running. Usually all at once. I also have an EEE PC, you may have heard about it, but it is running Linux with 512MB RAM and 4GB HDD, with a 4GB SDHC card for music and the such. Did I mention its processor which is an Intel Celery Stick running at nowhere near 900MHz.
Both of these machines are faster than my Laptop with Home Premium which came pre-installed (AMD dual-core Turion TL series, 2.0GHz, 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon 2600). Also, my gaming machine with a 2.1GHz Brisbane AMD Athlon X2 (System clock upped from 200 to 245MHz, CPU running FAR greater than 2.1), 2GB RAM, ATI Radeon 2900GT, etc. running XP is faster, duh, than the Vista machine, but not proportionally. It is insanely fast. Vista Ultimate running on that machine (for about a week before I upgraded to XP) would crash, was slow, etc.
Yet still, my fastest machine is my Fedora 6/7/8 machine with a P4 running at 1.6GHz.
So, Vista, you suck. Go die. I am tired of M$ bloatware.