NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007


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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2008/03/27/nvidia-...-crashes-in-20/

3-27-08-vista-crash.jpg

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.

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I've had my share of nVidia/Vista problems, most of them when trying to install an updated driver.

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oh man,and then the linux and mac zeaolts come here up in arms,and say that Vista is a faulty OS.

Thank god there are info that clarifies the situation here

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oh man,and then the linux and mac zeaolts come here up in arms,and say that Vista is a faulty OS.

Thank god there are info that clarifies the situation here

You forgot the loudest ones of them all, the WinXP zealots :laugh:

Seriously though, I've had my fair share of issues due to Nvidia drivers as well, hasn't been a smooth ride on that front unfortunatly.

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All others/unknown?

Is there really a difference? I mean there is but they could have included unknown with all others.

Yes there is, others are simply from places that aren't big enough for their own piece of pie.

Unknown means what caused the error is unknown. Two different things.

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Well, to be honest, nVidia's drivers have taken a huge turn for the worse. They take forever to come out, and when they do, it's usually exclusively game fixes (*cough* Crysis cough*). They really aren't working on stability anymore it seems.

Then you have ATI on the other hand, who have greatly improved their drivers from way back in the Rage3D era. The releases are every month, and always have significant changes. Sure, their hardware is a bit lacking right now, but their drivers are awesome.

It really looks like nVidia is turning into the next Creative.... That would be scary.

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oh man,and then the linux and mac zeaolts come here up in arms,and say that Vista is a faulty OS.

Thank god there are info that clarifies the situation here

It was the initial set of drivers which caused this problem. The new hardware and drivers are way stable.

P.S. Christmas is way too far :p

It really looks like nVidia is turning into the next Creative.... That would be scary.

That would be scary indeedy.

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Sorry but this is a poor excuse to try and cover up Vista's own failings. Dont go bashing nVidia, its not JUST their fault!!

This is a poor excuse to try and cover up your XP fanboyism. Check the graph. Of course it's not JUST nVidia. It's also ATI, and Intel, and various drivers from unspecified sources. Microsoft's own blunders caused less than 1 in 5 of the listed Vista crashes, so put your annoying pro-XP, anti-Vista stance on hold.

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I have had many blue screens on Vista from all sorts of hardware/driver issues. I also think it's ridiculous that Nvidia has not given us an update since December with exception to 9xxx series.

Aren't these numbers a tad misleading as Nvidia has a larger market share?

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Aren't these numbers a tad misleading as Nvidia has a larger market share?

The article DOES mention that bit of information.

However, their larger market share isn't directly proportional to their larger incidence of crashes. I had a look online, and the most recent data I could find was for Q2 2007, which had Intel at 37.6% of the market, NVidia at 32.6% and ATI at 19.5%.

Edited by FloatingFatMan
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I had problems with nVidia chipsets and gpu on my last rig (XP and vista).. So I decided to try Intel on my new computer (partly because AMD can't seem to come up with new processors that you can buy)..

So far haven't had a single bluscreen..

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This is a poor excuse to try and cover up your XP fanboyism. Check the graph. Of course it's not JUST nVidia. It's also ATI, and Intel, and various drivers from unspecified sources. Microsoft's own blunders caused less than 1 in 5 of the listed Vista crashes, so put your annoying pro-XP, anti-Vista stance on hold.

owned could have said it better myself great job !

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And if the OS was properly designed a single driver should never be able to crash the system.

so you're saying there are no properly designed OS' out there then...

and the majority of the nvidia rashes come from beta drivers. it's been pretty solid for me though, I think the graphics card caused more crashes on XP than it did on Vista, but I haven't had many crashes on Vista anyway. and the few times the graphics card has crashed I usually get just the driver restart, not a full crash.

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I can deinitely believe that amount was caused by Nvidias drivers, i'm suprised the figure wasn't higher.

For a long time in 2007 their drivers were complete arse. many missing features and general instability, ended up making me trade in my 8800gtx for an ati card.

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No surprise. Most of the crashes in Windows is driver related. This happened with XP also in the beginning. It took several months before the Nividia drivers were stable on my PC. Though I don't know how widespread it was.

Didn't Nvidia promise driver releases like ATI/AMD a while ago?

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