Crashing Vista: nVidia drivers responsible for 30%
Nearly 30% of logged Vista crashes were due to NVIDIA driver problems, according to a 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. The data points in the table cover an unspecified period in 2007, and Microsoft makes no attempt to break the aggregate data down into which device drivers, specifically, returned the highest number of crashes. If the number of failures were split by month and then graphed, we’d presumably see the number of NVIDIA driver failures per month decreasing as the company slowly brought its driver issues under control.
The data clearly indicates that NVIDIA had a driver problem, but it’s impossible to quantify the scope of that problem given the numbers above. NVIDIA holds a greater percentage of the market than ATI, which means that there will inevitably be a higher percentage of NVIDIA driver crashes than ATI driver crashes; however, the degree to which such market share considerations have affected the results above is hard to determine in the absence of more data. There’s also the matter of data collection; Microsoft’s charts do not clarify if multiple crashes from a single system each counted as separate events. In theory, NVIDIA’s proportion of total driver crashes could be inflated by a relatively small handful of systems with severe driver issues.
Source: Neowin
Comments(63)
Mines crashed a few times, because of nVidia, when I Do the DreamScene thing
I only ever had a problem with Vista beta versions… the retail version has been fine for me.
Finally some solid proof to through in Nvidia’s face to tell them “Your drivers suck!!!!” All the money they make and they can’t put out a decent set of drivers. Nvidia’s market share is roughly 15% more than ATI’s so it still tells you that it’s too much. Bottom line is their drivers suck and especially NV RAID software.
Vista wont be usable for years…hats off to anyone running it as there beta testing it for us
Steveo you’re an idiot. Xp Pre SP1 or SP2 was worse especially when it came to security.
Vista wont be usable for years?
How come i’m using it now? And i’m not a fanboy, nor do i work for Microsoft. Maybe you you build yourself a faster PC.
I’m gonna tried Ubuntu soon though, on a seperate hard drive. Just waiting for Hardy Heron to come out.
VI$TA sucks big time
Does it? …why?
ATI 4870X2 FTW!!!!!!!!!
I’ve been playing with Ubuntu Gutsy and it’s cool but the hardware compatibility is lacking. No drivers for my Creative X-Fi audio card or Linksys wireless adapter. The new 3D interface is cool, however you have to DL it separately, no big deal though. It’s something Microsoft should take some tips from .
im still running xp windows 7 will be out soon anyway lol.
my vista ultimate is still beautifully kickin, have a nividia 8500 gt by xfx and i dont have any video problems. guess its the luck of the draw.
well im waiting with the smart ones for SP10…lol
Xp works fine with nVidia, i have an 8600GTS that works perfectly (if its not broke don`t fix it)
So, which driver wiped my Documents folder and all my data (leaving the installed programs in perfect condition) when I upgraded to Ultimate using the Vista Anytime upgrade?
Four months of work – gone – and Dell/Microsoft’s only response is, “Should have done a backup”. Luckily I did, but to this day I can’t get an answer as to why my programs are still installed but my files were wiped.
There’s one reason for ya.
yep, that sounds about right.
No bluescreens for me in those 124 days I’ve used this computer. That is total time the computer have been turned on. Vista works like a charm!
totally inflated values, my system ALONE crashed 158.000 times because of nvidia drivers…
that is why my laptop runs like crap, thought it was just vista
i like the picture… it has a bsod on the screen… gutted!
Im gonna go against the “Cool kids” and say that Vista is awesome. Never had any problems with it.
“No bluescreens for me in those 124 days I’ve used this computer … Vista works like a charm!”
I have an XP machine that has never BSOD in the 3 years it’s been sharing files on my network. It’s never had a software related issue, period. I also have a CentOS webserver that has been rebooted twice in 2.5 years with no issues.
The fact that your OS does not spontaneously crash is barely reason for celebration.
i have problems with drivers in Vista an i stay with XP Sp2 for a period …to bad
aren’t drivers in vista supposed to be certified by M$ or else they wont even install in vista?
wtf did M$ certify? didn’t they notice during the certification process that those drivers cause so many problems?
maybe M$ thinks it’s better to have any driver than no driver at all? looks like xbox360 quality assurance process all over again…
When Vista first shipped, DirectX 10 applications tended to be slower than DirectX 9, but that was to be expected. That was simply the case because the hardware guys were given many years and hundreds of man-years to optimize their DirectX 9 drivers. With DirectX 10, they had to start from scratch.
Vista: “Resistance is futile”
yea, Vista sucks. i have also had problems with Vista/Nvidia drivers. i wish i could go back to xp media center. i never had any problems with it.
Companys need money from us
yeah NVIDIA’s drivers are a bit flimsy right now… but oh…
darnit I still have Win98SE and Celeron 500!
lol trying to make it sound like its a small thing, yeah just a few people having trouble with vista and nvidia drivers.. just a handful… just a few .. just a couple.. yeah ..
XP SP2 still crashes for me now and again, but Vista hasn’t (will forgive MS for it crashing during the beta period). I’ve recently downloaded SP3 but i have hardly any use for XP anymore. I have ONE program installed… Cubase SX3, due to the dongle emulator not working properly on Vista (at least when i tried it).
The main complaints i hear is ‘Vista is SLOOOOW!’ and ‘WTF, i need 1GB of RAM! – XP only needs 128MB!’…. who are these people? No-one should have less than 2GB these days, not when you can buy that (proper OCZ Platinum stuff) for £33. Try buying/building a new PC (or upgrade it) – benefits are, you get closer to being able to play Crysis, and Vista works flawlessly (at least, for me it does). Downside, i know that some people can’t afford this (me included, my current built PC is coming up to 2 years old w/ Athlon 64 X2 3800+… but running fine for now)
As for Vista being slow – not tried 3DMark comparison yet, but i’d say the games run exactly the same (ie. no noticable difference), DVD transcoding etc. seems to be the same, maybe i’ve built myself a great PC!
Sorry for the rant, but i’m tired of XP fanboys that don’t know what they are talking about.
Vista’s worked fine for me. Bought my X2 3800 and put in a 7600GT just before vista came out, got the free upgrade by mail. Installed it and haven’t turned off the computer since. It’s never crashed, it’s always played games (C&C3 ftw), mostly on high settings, and it goes into and comes out of hibernation more naturally than a bear.
I’ve never had a problem, and if you’re having problems it’s 99% of the time your own fault.
Also I work for Geek Squad (phone support) and I just dont understand how the media made all these people think Vista was so horrible. All these hicks that have no idea about computers, they still call the “tower” the “modem” or “brain,” but when I ask these people what Operating system they’re running they say; “Well, that’s my first problem. It has Vista on it.”
It never says whether they’re final or beta drivers. I’m inclined to believe it’s the latter: many gamers run Vista because of DX10 (no, don’t go telling me it’s not true, I see enough specs in forum posts and sigs), and they tend to use the latest available drivers, betas included – just think of Crysis. Well, betas are NOT WHQLd, NOT signed digitally, and NO company ever takes responsibility for their beta drivers. So, just consider that when interpreting such stats.
(PS @ tony: Windows Se7en comes out in 2011 earliest, if that’s “soon” for you, I suggest you wait it out with XP or some such…)
Unix.
That’s all.
I installed a brand new nvidia 7200 on my vista pc the other day and the card got fried about 20 hrs later…
vista is the anti-christ
Vista is really bad, couldnt run any games on it without them crashing, had to go back to XP which isnt much better but atleast doesnt crash every 5 minutes. All these years and computers still crash?!!!? what a scam!
I used to have a BSOD but now I don’t because I don’t overclock my 8800gtx. Only happened when I overclocked my card. Wish I would have stayed with 7 series in SLI…save myself a couple months of frustration.
mine have shutdown problem…I know it’s the nvidia driver but could never figure out which service is causing it…minor nuisance.
nvidia has anouced that they are woking on stable drivers for vista, you would at least thought after 7 years in development of vista it should have been fine but like all windows os it will get better with time currently using a nvidia 8500gt+ 1gb had no problems at all no crashes if you have had download drivers from the manafactures site not windows as sometimes it puts compatible drivers in instead
things have got slightly better with ther sp1 release for vista
I built a new pc and use Vista with a quad core Q6600 and Nvidia 8600GT. I had problems playing crysis for and my guitar hero crashed my entire system the other day, though I was using the custom songs hack.
As to those who don’t like vista, I believe it runs faster on newer hardware builds, the dashboard is nice and it a bit more visually pleasing.
If you have a chance to get any of the newer dual or quad core chips slowness is not a problem. I run crysis on very high with no skipping, though I think First person shooter games like crysis, COD4, and Bioshock are intensely over rated. I found bioshock profoundly disturbing, the little sisters gimmick was too far for me. The blood lust in games like COD4 and Assasin’s creed can leave you feeling a bit disturbed after the intense realism, but it is only a small % of the general population who play these games anyway so the reviews have to be biased. (sorry if that was off topic)
I did crash for me several times, but then at a high demand game, Like Assassins Creed on Full Graphs or Crysis….
would explain a little bit why…
I never had no problems with vista except program install issues for driver modifications,then it crashes. I am glad that I have xp pro yet or I would be screwed for my software.
But if you like the look of vista and want to use xp here is the links for it and the nfo file….enjoy
http://i31.tinypic.com/nv2id1.png
http://d01.megashares.com/?d01=c91f0d4
http://rapidshare.com/files/91074460/Win_XP_PRO_SP3_RC2__3300__VistaCG_Style.iso
Dont really understand all whining about vista,maybe i installed it on a new system with lots of ram and geforce gtx 8800..
Used to have LOTS MORE problems with Xp when i first installed it a few years ago.
Vista has only let me down a couple of times yet,and its WAY faster than Xp..(games,windows etc)
when i start my pc up some times i get nvidia graphics driver has stopped working and has now restarted ive tryed every thing but still keep getting the driver error but no joy …i hope this makes them do some thing about it
Its been getting better though imo.
Yea.. I have that same issue when I try to play Assassin’s Creed.. I bought for my brother’s Xb360 and wanted it for my PC…didn’t know it was so hungry to my memory and video like that amongst other things. Guess I now need to wait on better NVIDIA drivers and maybe upgrading my memory to 4gigs instead of 2.. It never ends.. All I want is a stable bad ass machine… Maybe one day I will be able to afford that.. But for now I am doing like the hindu… the best I can do.
I loved the fanboy response when the first Nvidia DX10 card came out. “So what if you spent $600 on a card that doesn’t work. Write your own drivers then.”
my vista crashes whenever i put flash video like from youtube on fullscreen… mine is a Ati.
@jay (36) & ‘vista haters’
I dual boot XP/Vista. I’d have to say that Vista works better with my video card (8800 GTS). Not to mention letting my video card scale my desktop with a fixed-aspect ratio works reliably only in Vista; I need to use a hack (registry fix) to get it to work with XP, which works maybe 50% of the time and only temporarily (through one resolution switch). It’s a known issue with XP and G80 video cards which nVidia has done nothing to fix…
Any problems I have with games are because of the games, not Vista. People fault the OS for things that more debugging by the application developers usually solves, through patches/new versions. Even though Vista is a bit slower, a bit bulkier, and has individual apps that crash sometimes (i.e. Windows Explorer and IE{which does suck}), overall it actually is rather reliable (i.e. OS not crashing on me, just individual apps), though definitely not 99+%, which happens when companies release their products early (probably were too eager start working on Windows 7).
That said, I still end up using XP most of the time (it has most of my apps). Waiting to get another 6 GB of ram to run Vista x64 without a swapfile ^_^ before I switch completely.
I am curious about what version nvidia drivers were crashing vista? It would be interesting if the data showed the crashes based on retail vs beta versions of the nvidia driver… My guess is that if nvidia drivers in total crashes 30% of the time, then how much of those crashes are due to the beta drivers that were still being tested, versus the versions that already been tested and approved… If the tested drivers crash 10% of the time, and the beta versions crash 20% of the time, that would be expected from beta software…
ati and xp ftw!
I had a major issue with the latest forceware drivers on my built in 6100.At first I though my mobo was a goner but when I installed the old driver enclosed in the cd,it all worked out….
and I was actually using win xp sp2…
i have vista ultimate 64 and a geforce 8600GT and yes, it crashes once in a while due to a driver problem (actually never happened during gaming). I’m one of the reports they receive
One of of biggest problems with the early beta it would crash alot just as much as when xp was in beta form. Since then we now have SP1 for vista and i haven’t had any problems.
@32 Nohea
Epic O-fkn-reeeeeally?
More like Q1 of 2010
Vista SUCKS! WinXP has no problems with the drivers, so which one is it that real has the problems…VISTA
Mind you that NVidia is making also chipsets, and it is my estimate that many of those crashes are especially because of that.
Also, I noticed that when i overclock my NVidia graphics card and get a crash, vista detects it as video driver problem.
And thrid – it was microsoft, that delivered incorrect drivers in all SP1 betas for the NVidia SATAs and RAIDs.
So the high percentage of nvidia drivers is only because nvidia has much wider product span.
@ hai2u – yeah well, figures they want to push it out early again, like Vista. Then everyone will be whining again cuz it offers nothing new, crashes, slow, then goto offers nothing new and repeat. Oh well.
Running an Intel DG965WH with two Sata Raid volumes, Nvidia 7600GT, and three OS partitions: XP Pro, Vista Ultimate x86, and Vista Ultimate x64. I have BSD crashes running either Vista OS at least once per day ofter more than once. This often breaks either one or both Raid volumes. I like Vista and with the end-of-product cycle looming for XP the migration to it or the new Windows program due out later is a must. Ubuntu is not an option for me.
I have disabled the startup Nvidia drivers (via msconfig) this morning and so far no crashes. Could it be that simple? I’ll add a post if it does.
Oops… I forgot to include that I am running a NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT. The video drivers are those that shipped with Vista and were updated by Windows Update. So far disabling them via msconfig show encouraging signs. I put Vista x64 through its paces this AM with no crashes. I am currently testing Vista x86 with equally successful results. However, I remain optomistically skeptical!
Definately add me to the 30% list. I downloaded and installed the latest version of drivers for my GeForce 7600GT video card (v169.25) from NVIDIA’s website. I haven’t had one crash since on my home or work systems with either Vista x86 or x64. Prior to this my Vista was basically unusable crashing frequently. Interestingly, Windows Update reports an update for my NVIDIA drivers dated 12/10/2007. I’m pretty sure these are the drivers I had been running. Word of caution, hide the update!
I have an Intel Q6600 installed in a nVidia P5N-E SLI motherboard, 2GB of RAM and an 8800GT from nVidia. I recently converted from XP to Vista (DX10 finally lured me in). But, I experience a lot of problems. Mainly due to the nVidia video driver, that continues to stop responding during my gaming (most often in Assassin’s Creed lately).
I like Vista. I like to be able to choose which operating system to run on my PC. I DON’T like that XP will be discontinued soon and that people are forced to use Vista. Why couldn’t they wait for Windows 7 to come out to finally retire XP?
Well, all in all I’m happy with Vista, but I’m unhappy with the results produced by the two companies (Microsoft and nVidia).
Step up to plate, guys!