nVidia drivers - the biggest reason for Vista crashes

Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but to get this out of the way first; Nvidia DX10 market share is substantial, and its user base among enthusiasts might well have a large degree of overlap with early adopters of the new OS.
 
I've had Nvidia driver crashes in Vista. In my case, I figured out the cause. I had faulty DDR2 memory. When I performed memtest scans, the ram failed majorly. Once I replaced the faulty DDR2, the crashes stopped. It seems many issues are reported as Nvidia driver issues when the real cause can be and is usually something else.
 
I've never had a single instance of Vista crashing. I've had a few programs crash. but that was due to bugs in them, not the drivers.

Edit: Using an 8500 GT.
 
I wonder how much of that is due to older drivers? I mean how often do MS and Nv put up new drivers on windows update? Maybe once a year at best?
 
My nVidia GPU driver used to recover from driver errors all the time at startup. The driver would reboot itself or something like that so it wasn't that big a deal.

My motherboard's chipset also wasn't officially supported in Vista so that probably had something to do with it. eff-u nVidia for not supporting nf2 in Vista.
 
Florin said:
Perhaps I'm stating the obvious, but to get this out of the way first; Nvidia DX10 market share is substantial, and its user base among enthusiasts might well have a large degree of overlap with early adopters of the new OS.
Click to expand...
That was my first reaction seeing the chart too, without percentage of different machines using ATi/AMD/Intel it's kind of useless. :(

That being said, nVidia's Vista drivers sucked the big ones at launch...so who knows?
 
A point I made on another forum:

The article spins the data to suggest video hardware, but the actual source data is delimited only by driver manufacturer -- not device class. Thus, we're also looking at NV chipset drivers in the mix here too...

So we have the total market penetration of NV chipsets + NV video devices in one pie slice, versus ATI video in the other pie slice. I think we can assume a rather unbalanced comparison there...
 
Albuquerque said:
A point I made on another forum:

The article spins the data to suggest video hardware, but the actual source data is delimited only by driver manufacturer -- not device class. Thus, we're also looking at NV chipset drivers in the mix here too...

So we have the total market penetration of NV chipsets + NV video devices in one pie slice, versus ATI video in the other pie slice. I think we can assume a rather unbalanced comparison there...
Click to expand...

True, but at least Intel has had superb drivers, just think how large share of chipsets (and gfx chips) they have out there
 
Albuquerque said:
A point I made on another forum:

The article spins the data to suggest video hardware, but the actual source data is delimited only by driver manufacturer -- not device class. Thus, we're also looking at NV chipset drivers in the mix here too...

So we have the total market penetration of NV chipsets + NV video devices in one pie slice, versus ATI video in the other pie slice. I think we can assume a rather unbalanced comparison there...
Click to expand...

If you follow the link to the source you would see that its actually AMD-ATI, which would include motherboards.
 
AlphaWolf said:
If you follow the link to the source you would see that its actually AMD-ATI, which would include motherboards.
Click to expand...

Yeah, but I figure it's a safe bet to say that the number of AMD/ATI chipsets out there is far smaller than the number of Nvidia chipsets.
 
Kaotik said:
True, but at least Intel has had superb drivers, just think how large share of chipsets (and gfx chips) they have out there
Click to expand...

That's certainly true, Intel is looking really solid here. But on the other hand, the workloads may not be completely comparable either. For instance those gfx chips aren't likely to be stressed in as many 3D apps as the other vendors.
 
AlphaWolf said:
Define 'far'. It's not 3:1.
Click to expand...

Where do you get those numbers for the installed base of Nvidia chipsets vs AMD/ATI among Vista users? I don't really have any.

Hmm, looking at Steam's latest hardware statistics for their Vista DX10 capable users though, 87.5% are using Nvidia video. Too bad they don't list chipsets too.
 
I think BRiT brings up the most relevant issue here: how many of these crashes are actually related to hardware failure, but cause a fault in the driver as a result? It doesn't surprise me at all that video drivers would be very strongly represented among such issues, as they make use of hardware in a pretty demanding fashion.
 
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