NVIDIA Vista shenanigans continue on

Author: Wil Harris
Published: 7th February 2007
Comments (27) Stumble
NVIDIA Vista shenanigans continue on

Don't expect to see super-hot Nalu in Vista.

Speculation and criticism about NVIDIA's approach to Vista drivers just won't die down, it seems.

The problem: that GeForce 8800 owners are so far yet to receive a stable driver that will run their games in Windows Vista. Having just spend hundreds of dollars/quids on their new cards, 8800 owners clearly aren't too chuffed.

The situation is made more complex by the conflicting information coming out of various places. There is an NVIDIA driver out for GeForce 8800 on Vista, version 100.59, but it's only in beta and SLI support is shaky at best. Gamers are reporting a lot of issues getting games running with this driver, including desktop crashes and random reboots. Not exactly the kind of thing you're after in a gaming machine.

So when can we expect drivers that will allow 8800 owners to get to grips with Vista? Well, Ars Technica spoke to NVIDIA's Derek Perez and reported that:

"While saying that driver development is "the highest priority" for NVIDIA, Perez refused to commit to a specific timeframe for shipping new drivers.

"We are working diligently to make sure we achieve and maintain the level of driver quality and reliability that NVIDIA is known for," said Perez. "Over the coming weeks NVIDIA and our partners, along with the industry will continue to update Windows Vista drivers to ensure maximum performance on 3D applications and add feature support."

All of which makes it sound like full, stable Vista support for GeForce 8800 owners is months, rather than days, away. This is a fact further compounded by some observations on the Inquirer, which points out that Dell's pre-built systems with GeForce 8800's aren't shipping with Windows Vista at all, and don't even have an availability date, suggesting that NVIDIA hasn't been forthcoming to even its biggest commercial partners with an expected timeframe for a stable driver release.

The flipside is that ExtremeTech was able to run a majority of 25 games on 8800/Vista without too many issues, reporting that performance was a bit slow but otherwise acceptable. The guys there concluded that "The only thing holding up the OS is a month or two worth of patches and driver improvements." This, again, seems to suggest that support isn't going to be immediately forthcoming.

This seems to be a pretty sorry state of affairs. It's not like we haven't known Vista was coming for months and months now, and it's not like NVIDIA hasn't had the final code and final GeForce 8800 cards to work on. What has happened to the driver? Is there some show stopping problem that is unexpected? Why hasn't it appeared on time, given that the time frame has been so widely known? We can only speculate, since it appears NVIDIA won't be more forthcoming than the limited information it gave to Ars Technica. It seems that, for 8800 users, a good upgrade experience to Vista is a way off.

Have you had problems? Or is everything running fine on your Vista / 8800 combo? Let us know over in the forums.
Quote DougEdey 7th February 2007, 11:31
They can't fix problems that they don't know about, of course it takes time to fix bugs but the more people that use the current drivers the more results they can get and the better they can make them
Quote Echo 7th February 2007, 11:35
Should I be worried about installing vista on the soon-to-be rig in my siggy? Is there support for 7800GT SLi?
Quote HugoB 7th February 2007, 11:38
The thought occurs that this may shed some light on why ATI/AMD have delayed their R600 card.
Quote [USRF]Obiwan 7th February 2007, 11:40
I highly suspect there is a "issue" with the 8800 hardware.

just think about it. Nvidia had at least 6 months time (or even more) before the official release of vista. This is more then enough time to make a wonderfull vista driver for the 8800 hardware. But Nvidia did not even manage to get a working 'beta' driver for the release. This looks very suspicous. The truth will come out about this.
Quote DougEdey 7th February 2007, 11:41
There's nothing suspicious about it, Vistas driver system has changed massively since XP and nVidia didn't get the RTM version of Vista until close to launch and Graphics drivers are a few million lines of code now.
Quote Nikumba 7th February 2007, 11:51
Saying its not nVidias fault they didnt get RTM code till close to release is utter nonsene.

Yes there has been a fundamental shift in how graphics are handled in Vista but these have been know since Vista started its Beta rollout. I am sure nVidia had close to retail hardware of teh 8800 range sometime the middle of last year giving them a full 6 months almost to get a decent driver up and running, Im not saying a perfect driver.

It could be there is an issue with the DX10 path in the GPU, or it could be nVidia driver are not addressing DX10 correctly. We wont know and I doubt we will ever know the real issue, only the marketing reason.
Quote DougEdey 7th February 2007, 11:59
I'd like to see you code and debug millions of lines of code within 6 months.
Quote bubsterboo 7th February 2007, 12:02
Ive always been impressed with nvidias driver support, i don't think they will take too long.
Quote mmorgue 7th February 2007, 12:29
I would have expected, what with the focus on dx10, MS & the 3rd party driver developers (i.e., nvidia) would have done far more driver testing or at the least, communicated better to ensure a "smooth"(er) launch.

With so much recent focus on Vista opening up multimedia avenues and the latest dx10 vid cards making games come to life, etc, that you cannot "rely" on your dx10 card to reliably run on the latest dx10 OS is just abysmal. :(
Quote r4tch3t 7th February 2007, 12:37
Quote:
Originally Posted by Archangel
The thought occurs that this may shed some light on why ATI/AMD have delayed their R600 card.
My thoughts exactly.
Sure nVidia should have drivers for vista, and they did bring out a driver for them, but it is beta. I reckon that they couldn't get the code working properly for Vista, but did have limited success, so released that as a beta so that at least the 8800s can be used. All the while they will be working on new drivers that work as good as or better than the XP ones.
Quote Djpuk 7th February 2007, 13:14
That has certainly made me put my money back in the savings account, think I will wait until this is sorted before I start buying the bits for my new rig.
Nvidia usually are very good with drivers I agree so I would hope it is weeks rather than months
Quote Panos 7th February 2007, 13:49
I own a 8800GTS but I'm not worried a lot. Why?

a) There isn't any DX10 game out. In this situation Nvidia needs to work closely with a DX10 project, eg Crysis, to solve on their drivers issue. If that project isn't ready yet, they cannot speculate how to write the proper driver. Yes they may have house made DX10 demo testing, maybe for months, BUT there aren't any 3rd party working games.
Regarding the time the driver needs to be ready, companies like Nvidia, AMD/ATI, Intel, etc have Vista on their hands for months now (if not a year). But if MS give them crap code and it's not able to work on, then?

b) With DX10 they have to reinvate the wheel. All the drivers should start from zero lines clean without bugs.

c) We all know that even MS hasn't manage yet to make compatible their own products with Vista.

d) All the complains about the perfomance has to do with the Vista. MS announced back in September that ALL games will be slower under Vista than XP by 10& to 35%. And that's a lot. Also think how many have the Aero under 1GB RAM trying to play a game. If this kind of crap sits on the memory (gfx & RAM) it will slow down everything. (Home Basic is your friend for gaming).

e) Regarding Dell's move. If I was Dell I would do the same. I want to sell my stupid expensive machines NOW not in a month. Think about that Dell was selling SLI 7900GS for £400/$800 (the 2 cards only for £400, the rest of the system was £1K+) around Xmas as their ultimate gaming machine. And I got my 8800GTS for £230 just bit before that.

Currently I use my 8800GTS under Vista RC2 (I have my free package as MSDN member from MS but I will not install it yet), and I had only few performance issues (Oblivion) which I know is the Vista responsible not the 100.59 drivers. After all why to use Vista for DX9??? I have the partition ready for DX10 only.
Quote quack 7th February 2007, 13:52
Meh, I don't even care about the 8800. I do however care about my nForce2 board which is terribly supported by NVIDIA (i.e. almost not at all) when it's more than capable to run Vista if the right drivers existed!
Quote DXR_13KE 7th February 2007, 14:22
Quote:
Originally Posted by DougEdey
I'd like to see you code and debug millions of lines of code within 6 months.

if my daily work is codding and nothing else..... and have all the best tools... bring it on :D
Quote squeck 7th February 2007, 14:37
i'm dual booting vista ultimate and xp at the mo with a single 8800gtx on an nforce4 board. i can play games like world of warcraft on vista but they are noticibly slower and i can't play video on my 2nd monitor at the same time which i can do in xp. so for the time being i'll carry on playing games on xp.

however i don't think there is any excuse for nvidia to not have stable drivers - even if they don't support all features. there aren't any dx10 games out, i'm not too bothered about a dx10 driver now BUT i do want a stable dx9 driver. i don't think its too much to ask having bought a £450 graphics card off them... also the nforce 4 drivers are awful - some of the onboard devices still aren't recognised by vista.

needless to say i'm not a happy person.
Quote radodrill 7th February 2007, 14:43
MS was still overhauling their code in Q4 2006.

How can you expect nVidia to devote their full efforts on writing drivers for an OS that isn't even finalized. Now that the release OS is finished nVidia can concentrate on writing a compatible driver set.

First releases of software/hardware are often a bit buggy until software/firmware/driver updates are released. Combine new hardware and new software all at once and you should expect to initially face troubles.
Quote Tim S 7th February 2007, 14:45
Quote:
Originally Posted by DXR_13KE
if my daily work is codding and nothing else..... and have all the best tools... bring it on :D
I believe Nvidia's current drivers are larger than Windows NT4 (in terms of number of code lines)
Quote randosome 7th February 2007, 15:55
as far as I've seen this (from the outside)

Microsoft brought out RC2 very late in 2006, then very quickly vista is being made available (business by December and everything else in January)

If i were nvidia i wouldn't start work on drivers (or not serious work) until i know that what I'm programming isn't likely to change too much
I was quite surprised how quickly MS made RC2 to gold, and people who have MSDN still said there were like 800 bugs when they made it gold

So although i think its odd that nvidia cant get 8800's working on DX9, i wouldn't say its all their fault
When will people learn that early adopters always get screwed, I'm not even considering vista until SP1

Jeez does anyone remember the XP launch, the number of complaints there were about it until SP1 were amazing
Quote Redbeaver 7th February 2007, 16:12
heh im just sad my SLI doesnt work :(

nvidia recognize both card, even the SLI, but performance is the same whether i use single or SLI.... sucks.............. :(

i need an SLI driver for 7 series! forget about 8 series, there isnt much of u guys out there anyway :p especially compared to us 7 series owners.....
Quote glaeken 7th February 2007, 16:58
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim S
I believe Nvidia's current drivers are larger than Windows NT4 (in terms of number of code lines)

This is true. My graphics professor had a chance to see the source for one of the versions of their drivers and he said it's just a complete mess. It's incredibly hacky, really hard to read and find and fix bugs. So it's not surprising they're having a hard time finding/fixing the problem.
Quote Bluephoenix 7th February 2007, 17:47
I'm curently running an SLI BFG WC 8800GTX pair and I did not expect to have full vista support for a while anyway.

lets review the facts:

1) The ENTIRE driver structure has been completely re-written in Vista

2) DirectX 10 is a new animal and 9.0L is a different breed as well in comparison to 9.0c

3) Nvidia is dealing with 2 new codebases and for any bugs has to track to see whether it is a DirectX adressing error or a driver code issue. (for either version)

combine these with the fact that the finalized code was released shortly before RTM release, and that graphics are handled by the main OS in a completely different way and you come up with the ideal conditions for a driver coding nightmare.
Quote fannypad 7th February 2007, 18:58
Why is anyone defending nvidia in this case?

I'd call it a pretty comprehensive **** up when your top-end product is not working properly with the most significant consumer software release in years that everyone's creaming their kecks over... and Dell won't be too chuffed having their £3K box sales scuppered by this.

I'm with whoever said it's a hardware issue, I hope it gets blown out of the closet Inquirer style.

I like drama.
Quote DXR_13KE 7th February 2007, 19:48
Quote:
Originally Posted by glaeken
This is true. My graphics professor had a chance to see the source for one of the versions of their drivers and he said it's just a complete mess. It's incredibly hacky, really hard to read and find and fix bugs. So it's not surprising they're having a hard time finding/fixing the problem.

the thing i hate the most when someone codes is spaghetti code, it is better to make it all again than to try to fix it.
Quote Steven Tarise 7th February 2007, 21:35
People cry foul when nVidia cant get a full driver our for a new OS, yet when Netgear flat out state that they're not planning on supporting 64bit systems for the forseeable future, everyone just turns a blind eye?

I've kept my old XP install on a different HDD because I knew Vista would have problems, but I was curious. Now, if I want to play games, all I do is change the drive, and I'm back. Some people will find this a difficult concept to accept, but when you're dealing with systems this complex, you have to expect some niggles along the way.

I just feel sorry for MS. You know the boys on the anti-Windows bandwagon are gonna spin this any which way they like.
Quote Tim S 7th February 2007, 21:39
Quote:
Originally Posted by glaeken
This is true. My graphics professor had a chance to see the source for one of the versions of their drivers and he said it's just a complete mess. It's incredibly hacky, really hard to read and find and fix bugs. So it's not surprising they're having a hard time finding/fixing the problem.
I would imagine that the Vista drivers are a bit cleaner than XP drivers. The latter have been through thousands of revisions and supported many different product cycles over the years. :)
Quote speedfreek 7th February 2007, 23:50
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim S
I would imagine that the Vista drivers are a bit cleaner than XP drivers. The latter have been through thousands of revisions and supported many different product cycles over the years. :)
So how bad does it work for you tim? Have you experienced any crashes yet?
Quote glaeken 8th February 2007, 00:36
Quote:
Originally Posted by Tim S
I would imagine that the Vista drivers are a bit cleaner than XP drivers. The latter have been through thousands of revisions and supported many different product cycles over the years. :)

I would hope so. But when you already have bad practices... :(
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