Techlines Today

Internal emails put NVIDIA platform on Vista in bad light

By Adam Myers ⋅ March 28, 2008 ⋅ Tags: bugs, class-action, lawsuit, microsoft, nvidia, rhetorical question, vista

You may have heard of the recently launched "Vista Capable" lawsuit in which there is mounting evidence that Microsoft tweaked the minimum specifications of what constitutes a PC as Vista Capable, much to Intel’s delight. Judge Martha Pechman, who is overseeing the class-action, has ordered the release of over 150 pages of internal Microsoft emails for our perusal. Ars Technica has done the dirty work and gleaned that 28.8% of Vista’s crashes throughout 2007 were due to faulty NVIDIA drivers.

NVIDIA had significant problems when it came time to transition its shiny, new G80 architecture from Windows XP to Windows Vista. The company’s first G80-compatible Vista driver ended up being delayed from December to the end of January, and even then was available only as a beta download. In this case, full compatibility and stability did not come quickly, and the Internet is scattered with reports detailing graphics driver issues when using G80 processors for the entirely of 2007.

Caution must  be exercised however as even though NVIDIA represents almost a third of all Vista crashes one could just as well argue that they own one third of the market so there is a natural correlation with the amount of crashes. This is a popular "yeah but" when discussing the number of Windows exploits vs. all the other guys. Unfortunately for NVIDIA, this is the type of information that will linger on for quite awhile, even after the problems have long been addressed. I’m quite guilty myself as there was a time in the late 90’s that ATI was the epitome of awful device driver excellence. Having been burnt enough in those days, I haven’t touched an ATI video card since. I’d assume their drivers are much better nowadays but I wouldn’t know - why bother when I’ve moved on without any regrets. So perhaps the sour note provided by NVIDIA during the early days of Vista will linger on.

My rhetorical question, did Microsoft certify the faulty drivers, and if so, in my opinion, Microsoft has little right to point fingers.

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