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NVIDIA assures better Vista drivers soon
Author: Richard SwinburnePublished: 9th February 2007
Nalu should get better looking in Vista real soon say Nvidia.
Mr. Diercks highlights that with every OS change there is major driver work to be done with many games, but since XP was released NVIDIA has had several iterations of hardware and introduced SLI, as well as the fact that it has to cope with not only Direct X 9 and 10 but also an entirely new driver model.
He says that NVIDIA now has to approach driver development in an entirely different way, and instead of having to develop two driver sets: one for SLI and one for single card they now have to develop six: One for DX9 single card, one for DX9 SLI, one for DX10 single card, one for DX10 SLI, one for OpenGL single card and one for OpenGL SLI.
Not only has this changed, the driver design has change since Microsoft moved the driver set from the Kernel mode into User mode leaving the system more stable but drivers have be written to navigate from one into the other. Also, with Vista becoming far stricter about what it lets into Kernel mode, the tweaks and hacks traditionally use no longer apply, so it’s a case of finding them all over again.Finally couple in the fact that each driver is some 20 million lines of code and you can see why this is a task of mind boggling proportions.
However, it’s not like the beta releases of Microsoft’s Vista OS haven’t been around for a while, despite changing quite significantly over the past 6-9 months since the “public” release, this has still given NVIDIA plenty of time to work on them.
There’s even a time line laid out as to when we can expect support and improvement in features for each of the driver types over the next few months. With some of the first Direct X 10 titles being expected in late March and into April, NVIDIA seems to be focusing on this time as a target to get their Direct X 10 hardware working solidly. For those with SLI, you’ll still be out of luck for sometime afterwards though, as single card performance is being concentrated on over that of SLI.
Can you forgive NVIDIA considering the mountain of work it is up against? Or is it a band aid on a compound fracture of “Vista Ready” promises made and broken, considering the consumer release is public and people have invested a lot of money in their hardware?
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Comments (18)Stats: 0.139 seconds
This is not acceptable.
No sorry it's not good enough, it's poor when they said they would be ready and they have issues with DX10 drivers? what was the point of releasing a DX10 card when you knew the drivers were not ready.
Hire more programmers Nvidia, you have traditionally been good at driver releases 9apart from the delays, non WHQL certification, etc). And a 6 month old card not being supported and crashing - terrible.
Vista hasn't just creeped up on everyone, it's been in beta for nearly 2 years. ANY manufacturer who does not have drivers or nearly finished release drivers is doing a rubbish job. (not even going to get into creative screwing Audigy users at the moment.)
Nvidia are being lazy, they seem to think as long as they have good drivers before April everything will be gravy. Not good enough.
And I hear the lame excuse 'but we didn't get the RTM code soon enough'. Not good enough! Microsoft delayed the release of Vista by two months to allow for hardware driver optimization...
NOT GOOD ENOUGH.
Currently it looks like over half my Nvidia hardware won't be supported under Vista :'( , then again, it's not the only OS out there :D .
I find it odd that nvidia has to redo 20 million lines of code, 6 times .... (Well i would suspect that 20 millions would drop quite a lot once you separate each type)
I thought nvidia has had vista drivers for the RC builds for quite some time now, what happened to that ?
The 100.59 drivers not only fix the 8800 support, they also allow SLI in several games. But only for 8800 series cards.
How many promises of features have been lost on the vista consumer end? How many changes do you think they've made for their hardware compatibility? Early XP drivers where fairly good but only beacuse HW manufacturers had W2000 to practice on. This time they've only had betas which by their very nature change.
Vista was supposed to become the easiest windows to write drivers for at the beginning but the security features crept in and changed that. One new security feature could well have meant a re-write and a lot of wasted time & money. It was a business decision and those decisions are never what the consumer wants.
That's the way I see it and I do feel for those who've spent thousands on their HW to have it not work but vista is new it still has its rough edges this is just one of the roughest bits.
Anyway there aren't any DX10 games out yet so just dual boot Vista and XP and use XP for gaming.
Seems that nVidia's following Creative's steps.
Assures whom?
</GrammarNazi>
It's quite shocking that a card from just six months ago won't work properly under Vista. Neither the six sets of drivers nor the switch from Kernel-mode to User-mode drivers is sufficient justification. I understand that it's a lot of work, but surely they've known about it for a while now?
edit: scratch that, I've found out Creative now have Beta drivers and they seem to work with my card.
with the majority of people have a Dx9 cards, why are the tiny group of elitist that owns the 8800 series being higher in the priority? i dont get it.
its like selling thousands of honda civics during the last decade and then honda released a new civic 2008 last month. this month the law said, oh i dunno, all civics have to have a new braking system.
why do u wanna work on the 2008 models first??? why are u prioritizing the extremely few early adopters over your decade long supporters????
why do u wanna work on Dx10 for 8800series and SLI, then Dx10 for 7series, then SLI for 8series, then SLI for 7series, and THEN look at the Dx9....
u think ALL OWNERS of nvidia VGA will play Dx10 games only when it comes out??? and their *flagship* technology, so-called SLI, which they brag much better than Crossfire and recommend everybody to have it, has to wait all the way at the back of the line???
that's BULL!
i dont care that it takes months and months for nvidia to get a Vista driver coz hey, its vista, its new, and it always happen to new OS... its alot of code and i can undersTAnd that, for real...
but set ur priorities straight!!!! dont shaft the loyal customers who bought and support ur older products and adopt the SLI technology and has been playing Dx9 games (and most will still be in the future, i bet!) for a few years!!!
ah yes yes, Dx9 lol sorry, typo...
yes i am aware of that. thank u for noticing