Nvidia’s first release Vista drivers were simply incomparable to the performance of drivers for Windows XP. PC Perspective interviewed Nvidia's Software Engineering VP Dwight Diercks and finally asked what was on every Nvidia user’s mind.
Diercks explained that with Windows XP, NVIDIA simply needed to create two separate drivers: one for DirectX rendering and one for OpenGL rendering, while for Vista, NVIDIA has to develop six separate drivers: SLI and non-SLI versions for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL. In Vista, Microsoft moved the driver stack into the user space in the operating system, effectively making the kernel much more stable, but adding another layer of abstraction for NVIDIA’s software to get through before directly accessing the hardware. Each Vista driver supposedly contains 20 million lines of code (roughly the same number of lines as Windows NT 4.0).
Diercks has said that the new ForceWare drivers will be release on a monthly schedule, much like AMD's Catalyst drivers, unless of course there are major bugs found between releases. A WHQL-certified ForceWare release for Windows Vista is expected before the end of February. Nvidia also plans to release another update in March with GeForce 7 SLI capabilities and better TV output support. April is the month where support for DirectX 10 SLI and H.264 video acceleration is planned to be addressed.
Link: Forum Discussion (Thanks Tantawi)
News source: PC Perspective
Diercks explained that with Windows XP, NVIDIA simply needed to create two separate drivers: one for DirectX rendering and one for OpenGL rendering, while for Vista, NVIDIA has to develop six separate drivers: SLI and non-SLI versions for DirectX 9, DirectX 10, and OpenGL. In Vista, Microsoft moved the driver stack into the user space in the operating system, effectively making the kernel much more stable, but adding another layer of abstraction for NVIDIA’s software to get through before directly accessing the hardware. Each Vista driver supposedly contains 20 million lines of code (roughly the same number of lines as Windows NT 4.0).
Diercks has said that the new ForceWare drivers will be release on a monthly schedule, much like AMD's Catalyst drivers, unless of course there are major bugs found between releases. A WHQL-certified ForceWare release for Windows Vista is expected before the end of February. Nvidia also plans to release another update in March with GeForce 7 SLI capabilities and better TV output support. April is the month where support for DirectX 10 SLI and H.264 video acceleration is planned to be addressed.
Link: Forum Discussion (Thanks Tantawi) News source: PC Perspective
seriously! MARCH?!?!?! what the hell! i would be SO ****ED if i actually had to buy my copy of vista. its gotten to the point where i am almost considering buying an ATI card to replace my 7950gx2....
how sad is that?
I don't for one minute buy the assertion that ATI has better drivers at all – especially where Vista is concerned. In any case, ATI drivers have always caused me more grief than Nvidia drivers on any operating system or hardware.
Last edited by Octol on 10 Feb 2007 - 03:34
And on a personal note, as the owner of two nVidia 7950s in Quad-SLI, I'm not a happy camper about that part either.
However, I will admit that the last few driver releases from nVidia have been terrible, and not just the Vista ones.
Anybody else not buying that?
Vista itself has been estimated at around 50 million lines of code.
I'm not buying it. They are confusing their hardware driver with that bloated control center AND the advanced properties tab they include in their driver. They should develop and ship it separatly.
Since a software driver is far more complex than a control panel applet, how can you not be buying that, but buy that the control panel applet would be as complex as an operating system? It sounds like you're just trying to make nVidia look bad by inventing your own reasons for the driver complexity, with zero factual basis.
And even if the applet size was included here, it's still pretty amazing sizes we're dealing with.
Since a software driver is far more complex than a control panel applet, how can you not be buying that, but buy that the control panel applet would be as complex as an operating system? It sounds like you're just trying to make nVidia look bad by inventing your own reasons for the driver complexity, with zero factual basis. And even if the applet size was included here, it's still pretty amazing sizes we're dealing with.
If you look at their installation files, you will notice the largest file is the one for the Control Panel. Yes, there are images inside, but applications require many things low-level drivers do not, such as help files and translations. These are often included in the number of codelines.
I am not 'inventing my own reasons', I am saying I do not buy that their driver need to be so complex. All they have to do is translate the calls made by DirectX into something their own hardware can understand. If that requires 60M lines of code, they should move more of it to hardware.
My personal opinion is that they are moving in the direction Creative has always been going, with extremely shiny (and lumpy) driver configuration applets. And they should really stop including both the new and the old control panel in their drivers.
Finally - it is not 'amazing', it is annoying, and probably hard for nVidia to maintain as well.
And yes, I am a software developer.
I can only assume much of that code is legacy support for older cards (I really hope that's the case)..
It is more a matter of choices, their "all in one" driver model have worked great for many years. Perhaps it is time to change that model.
Just because you're the best doesn't mean you don't do stupid mistakes. NASA learned that with Apollo1 and the Challenger.
You have no idea what 20 million lines of code looks like.
^^
Quite possibly one of the most uninformed persons I have seen posting on NW. You have no idea what you are posting about.
No, I call BS.
The card I'm using is the 256mb GeForce 6200 AGP 8X made by PNY Technologies. I'm using the most recent Vista drivers and everything runs smoothly. I've had no issues.
I have that exact card, latest drivers, and it's buggy as hell.
you being a Linu person should know that right... since that's what allows you to restart the drivers at wil, and not have to reboot and crap.
Who told you this -- Microsoft or nVidia?
Bah, I haven't used the official drivers yet, its not worth it; download the Vista drivers and use the modded inf file.
Bah, I haven't used the official drivers yet, its not worth it; download the Vista drivers and use the modded inf file.
97.46 from windows update works on go..and that was in november lol
I understand the need for a new DX10 driver, since DX10 is so different from DX9, but drivers for OpenGL and SLi for DX9, those should be close to the same as they are on XP. But then they go on to say "MS changed the driver stack into user space.", ok, and this was known about way before Vista went RTM in Nov '06, this, to me, just sounds like nVidia trying to push some of the blame back on MS for making changes.
So ok, nVidia has a DX10 card, ATi doesn't, so you can argue that ATi has less work to do for Vista right now, but even though nVidia has it's DX10 card, do we have any DX10 games yet? No. The priority should still be DX9 and OpenGL on Vista. And just because ATi doesn't have it's DX10 card yet doesn't mean it doesn't have a DX10 driver ready, when the new Radeon cards hit before the end of Feb, or March, watch ATi release a nice new WHQL Catalyst 7.3 driver without delay.
I can't even get CSS running good.. on a 7800GT
Nothing wrong with monthly drivers, but it's like, they fix one problem (performence), but manage to somehow break something else. And people wonder why Intel leads in overall chipset and onboard gfx sales, their stuff just works, and intel has some great software coders who write drivers and other apps.
That having been said, I also need to state that I do not use my system as a gaming platform. For me (and likely for the majority of users) as long as everything looks correct, as long as Word and Firefox and whatever other production software we use works and displays correctly, as long as we can do our work we could care less about performance of the video card on whatever current games are hot. Folks who work with graphics programs, that's a different matter as there are some issues with the OpenGL implementation, but that's a small subset of the majority, just as gamers are a small subset of the total users with NVidia cards. Just because performance is sub-standard (from your point of view) doesn't mean that performance overall is bad. Most users wouldn't even know a frame rate if it snuck up behind them, just as it's likely you don't know how to perform a mean deviation on an Excel spreadsheet.
NVidia is not the only company with driver issues and having waited until the last moment. Creative Labs, Linksys and others also played the waiting game, mostly because Microsoft kept changing little things in the way Vista worked with drivers with each revision. (As for x64 support, there are companies that still haven't released drivers for Windows XP x64, much less working with Vista x64).
Yeah right, could just as well believe in the tooth fairy if you believe that
Sli is additionally postponed to sometime in March.
Then, having as much lines in the driver as in the whole NT 4.0 is really the über-bloat
Congrats, nVidia, you always manage to reach new records in incompetence
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