What is Digg?109 Comments
- DogGunn, on 10/12/2007, -7/+33I have both Video cards as well - and I have found that the ATi drivers are currently matching the preformance of XP. (So I don't know what you are on about)
- syl1985, on 10/12/2007, -7/+31The only problem klawz is that the nVidia cards also tout "get ready for vista!" or "100% vista ready" etc..
- MalDON, on 10/12/2007, -11/+34Oh come on, a lawsuit! Bunch of cry-babies if you ask me.
You can't sue a company because their product doesn't perform to your standards. Hey it works, they only said it would work. Where do they say it works good. Besides, Vista hasn't been out for a month yet. Give it time. - sirmasterboy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+21Try that ati card in an opengl game, ati's drivers are only at about 60-70% operating with opengl in vista.
- DogGunn, on 10/12/2007, -1/+17nVidia drivers are currently lacking. They should be way more up to scratch then where are currently released to the public, still, this class action lawsuit that people are talking about is way over the top. It is not necessary and good drivers will be released over time.
- PleaseJustDie, on 10/12/2007, -3/+18@shinda
Have you even used a aero enabled vista computer? Based on your assumption its just a "bloated OSX" I would say no. Vista is most definitely a windows operating system. Its got about as much in common with OSX as Windows XP, that being they are both graphical user interfaces. Vista's functionality and operations are still almost identical to XP's. With aero though we get some cool little fades and swoops on windows and some shadows and a frosted glass border on the windows and that doesn't sound ripped from OSX to me.
I've got it on a couple of my work computers to ensure vista compatibility with a few programs we have and the only complaints I have are: Vista Basic sux balls, I'd rather have a XP theme than be stuck using vista basic theme if my computer wasn't Aero compatible (which after talking my boss into letting me get more ram and a new video card so I can test under aero, it is) and some of the simple programs don't run correctly unless I right click them and say "Run as Administrator" which was kind of annoying trying to figure out why a program was being blocked from this action or another (like raw sector writes to a floppy disk) and causing the program to fail. Overall though if you have to use windows, i.e. develop software for customers using windows like I do where I work, it is much more secure than XP and Aero makes it suprisingly responsive too.
There are times in XP where you double click on my computer and it can take 20-30 seconds for the window to appear. Under vista (with aero) when I double click on something like Computer it opens right away, its very responsive and I can say I'm rather somewhat impressed with how microsoft has managed to present vista (with aero) and they have done a great job. Though, IMO, Beryl is still much more advanced of a hardware accelerated interface and Microsoft has really left the "Vista Basic" interface looking like crap.
However, anyone using an 8800 or an SLI and ran out to immediately upgrade to vista and didn't know they would have problems are fairly stupid. If you run Microsofts own update programs telling you how compatible your computer is and look at their list of compatible cards it lists those cards as compatible but also says for full compatibility they will need a driver update. Anyone that didn't bother to do any research before hand and just assumed that everything would be perfect as of day one, well you know what they say about people who assume. - twatwaffle, on 10/12/2007, -6/+19This is why I have an Xbox 360.
- Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -10/+22Is there much of a difference than playing HL2:LC at 10fps?
- CPUGUy, on 10/12/2007, -13/+25Shut up, seriously.
- shakin, on 10/12/2007, -6/+18Vista was released last year to businesses so Nvidia has had plenty of time to make drivers.
The problem is that if NVidia's drivers aren't ready to run properly in Vista they shouldn't be advertising them as such. When you buy a video card that says on the box it works in Vista you expect it to work. - LoneWolf15, on 10/12/2007, -0/+12I'll say what I've said other places; I think most users' problem is with nVidia's marketing, which could be construed to be a promise on nVidia's part.
The vast majority of Geforce 8800 boxes bear the logo "Vista Ready" on them. nVidia's website itself boldly proclaimed (up until 24 hours ago or so, it appears the number of upset people may have caused this to change) on the front page "nVidia: Essential for the Best Windows Vista Experience". It still says in smaller print, "The Best Vista Experience - In and Out of the Box".
At this time, they are providing nothing of the sort, and such claims come off as a load of arrogant bollocks. Drivers are beta (and I've heard that nVidia's 680i chipset drivers are buggy as well, though not having one of these mainboards, I cannot confirm it) and appear to be buggy for a number of users. To me, "Vista Ready" means "When Vista is released to consumers, we will have a fully working (that is, WHQL, non-beta) driver available". While I'm not running Vista on my production box (have RC2 on a test machine) I believe that nVidia made a promise, and that they failed to deliver.
I'm not a fan of class-action lawsuits either, so I'm glad that it appears from the Ars article at least, that the goals of nVidiaClassaction.org are laudable. If nVidia actually apologized, and didn't keep its customers in the dark (which it has done in the past with other notable issues, like rev. 1 PureVideo, and the nForce hardware firewall that wasn't), I think people would cut them a lot more slack. I certainly would. But I've seen a pattern with nVidia of not saying anything and attempting to sweep problems under the rug until a)they come up with a fix in situations where it affects their bottom line, or b)the angry voices die down (i.e., PureVideo rev. 1 and nForce hardware firewall, both errors in the silicon that could not be fixed) and the issue goes away, and that is what disappoints me. - tardmongerster, on 10/12/2007, -3/+14Vista has been RTM since November. And it was release candidate or beta for nearly a year before that. It's not like Vista just appeared out of nowhere a week ago. Nvidia had plenty of time to develop drivers.
I understand that driver development takes time and is complicated, but the problem is that Nvidia has been selling the 8800 cards since November by marketing them as "Vista Ready" and "DirectX 10 Ready" etc. A lot of people bought these cards and the Nforce boards in anticipation of running Vista and DirectX 10 on launch day, but "Vista Ready" is a complete lie. The only drivers, released on 1/31/07 are terrible beta drivers. Many, many people get terrible game performance, and lots of crashes. SLI is not enabled for DirectX 10, so all those who supported Nvidia TWICE by buying 2 cards are doubly screwed.
And it isn't just the video drivers. Their nforce chipset drivers are a problem too. Widespread problems include sleep mode not working, the computer reboots instead of shutdown, RAID doesn't work, even corrupting files, gigabit network limited to 100mb, and all around slow performance. Again, only beta drivers, or low-end drivers on the Vista disk have been available. Just yesterday Nvidia finally released WHQL drivers for most of the Nforce chipsets, and while they are an improvement, there is a long way to go. - sirmasterboy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+15I have dual 7900GTX and i only get half the performance in vista because it doesn't support SLi...
- halfcockedjack, on 10/12/2007, -3/+12I've not had any problems with my card, although performance seems a bit slower. My roommate, who has an 8800, has been utterly screwed by NVIDIA dropping the ball on the drivers. He ended up giving up on Vista and is going to wait until SP1 to upgrade from XP again.
- MackDiesel2010, on 10/12/2007, -14/+21SweEet dude you got HL2 lost Coast werkin in linux?!?!? Oh wait.
- SirZRX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7In WoW 1440x900
XP= 75 FPS Vsync on
Vista = 30-18 fps - fenrir, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9I have an 8800 GTS with the latest vista drivers and they have worked perfect for me and match the performance of the xp drivers.
- BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -3/+9"""So having high standards is suddenly bad [just because you want to bash Microsoft]?"""
Please don't assume I'm some kind of moron. By "unreasonable driver spec" I haven't made any mention of things that require high standards, I mean the parts of it which are in no way whatsoever required for, or related to the functionality of the hardware device.
I'm also bemused at you saying I "just want to bash Microsoft". It's not true - where Microsoft does a good job of something I'll dispassionately say so if it's relevant to the conversation, and where they don't I'll say that too. NT security features were great. Their mouses are great, I swear by them. At the moment, they're doing some pretty heinous things with their OS software and I wouldn't pay money for it.
Dismissive comments like "just because you want to bash Microsoft" may work with whoever you're aiming at, but hysteria doesn't cut much ice with ordinary geeks to be honest. Let what I say stand on its own merits.
As for the nvidia access to betas, well that's a fairly valid point. However, if the devices work at this point, and are still being refined days after release, it's pretty harsh to blame nvidia when the problems Vista poses for driver writers are pretty much common knowledge among early adopters. - BassJunkie, on 10/12/2007, -7/+12I wholely agree with maldon, the OS was only released less then 2 weeks ago! I'm sure everthing didn't run smoothly on XP at first! Its quite interesting looking over this artice after reading the other Vista gaming story that made the front page (25 Games tested with Vista) where they have no problem running some of the games people are having problems with here! The problem is probably because all these people have OC'ed their hardware and it's just a bit more jittery under Vista!
- sid0, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5Intangir, you're a fool. No, really. Vista has video drivers that render the whole desktop as 3D. Earlier drivers can't do that. A new driver architecture has been formed for this. You need BRAND NEW drivers for Aero glass.
- SirBotchness, on 10/12/2007, -8/+12Heaven forbid microsoft actually upgrade their operating system. Everyone is bitching that vista is xp SP3, yet every time a new feature is mentioned people bitch cause it is too new and they don't like it. If you are going to rush into the upgrade then you're going to have problems, plain and simple. Get over it, and buy ATI. Chill on the games since they'll probably have to run a few updates to run on vista as well. Personally i understand this problem, i went though it when xp came out. HIstory repeats itself yet no one pays attention.
and goddamnit, DRM has nothing to do with drivers, shut up. - BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5"""Ok, so DRM is part of drivers, you still don't show me how that is relevant in games crashing. thats what we're talking about, not every day use. The drivers work until you try to start cranking up the power."""
No. Voltage fluctuations that could cause this are the sort that can easily occur in an end user's perfectly functional computer while reading their email. Incidence is just likely to be greater where you're starting to do stuff that might cause bigger voltage fluctuations - that's why I mentioned power gamers and overclockers.
"""Fact is DRM isn't activated unless you're using a program or file that requires it. """
You should be aware that Vista DRM/content protection can be started by any program on your computer on a completely arbitrary basis, and could be running at any time for various reasons that have nothing to do with, say, watching a BluRay DVD.
It's all very well for certain company representatives to make smoke-and-mirrors announcements about content protection being related to "policy" but that just means "this will only happen when a program is making it happen" instead of what people seem to think it implies: "this will only happen when watching media".
It should also be possible for people to set up GPU DOS attacks that stop you playing effectively using this tech.
"""What you're saying is the drivers aren't up to par with current technology. You can blame MS all you want, but the fact is technology changes. DX10 is new, and newer drivers are required. Vista's driver technology isn't the same as XP's...holy crap thats not cool!! If you want to keep xp features, then stay with XP."""
I'm saying the Vista technology, with specific regards to hardware drivers, entails all sorts of problems. It will certainly impact performance - that will have to be worked around - that's not the end of the world, but it will chop FPS off your gameplay. It will probably introduce stability issues. That's not good.
It will certainly lengthen the driver development lifecycle, and may introduce unsolvable bugs which your driver writer just spends months trying to test their way out of to no avail. Well that wouldn't be so bad if it were for a step-up in the technology, but these things are not happening for those reasons - I'm not even talking about dx10 because people expect to support upgrades.
What I mean, is that most of these problems are introduced for functionality that does not benefit the owner of the computer, does not benefit the performance of the hardware or benefit the hardware manufacturer, and does not benefit the driver writers. Whilst the costs are borne by you, and by ATi and NVidia, the functionality you're paying for is being introduced for the benefit of a third party, putting everyone else at LOTS of expense and trouble so they can limit the ways in which you can perform one small part of what you might do with a computer.
"""Put out drivers that work and this wouldn't be an issue. Seems ATI is doing fine, with subtle problems here and there, but people can still enjoy their high dollar hardware, with their cutting edge games."""
ATi have many more driver development issues than NVidia, and if they get stuff out, it doesn't mean they've had it easy.
Personally, I have been stung for cash by ATi's neglect of their drivers - probably in favour of Vista drivers to be honest. - matthewf01, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5I'd much rather see a class action lawsuit against Creative.
At least Nvidia has fairly functional drivers for the REST of their products too, and not just the flagship ones
(ahem, X-Fi....) - Slovenian6474, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Buying ATI at this point isn't going to give you DX10 support any quicker.
- LilRabbitFooFoo, on 08/11/2008, -0/+3It's a NEW GPU architecture for a NEW OS (Vista) with a NEW driver model (WDDM) using a NEW API (DirectX 10).
This is called a perfect storm and 8800 owners are just going have to ride this out for a few weeks more. - Dysl3xicDog, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Now you know what it feels like to be a linux user :)
- ThirdPrize, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Hey, he's arguing with you. I'd bring a Class Action lawsuit aginst him, just for the heck of it.
- KrazyKoala, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4I have a Radeon X800XL 256mb and it works well, but I have a lot of troubles in Vista with Dual Monitors. When I diable my secondary display (it uses port 1-DVI), the first one goes all screwy and I have to reboot. Same thing when I rotate the secondary display, its all messed up.
- Sinclaw, on 10/12/2007, -4/+7I've a 8800gtx as well, and it's proudly written all over the box "READY FOR VISTA"... We won't go into the fact IMO Vista was released last year, but they forced a beta driver out the door on the 31st, which is pretty useless if you actually plan to play games with it.
- jer2eydevil88, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Everyone needs to stop bitching about the lack of driver support for Vista, the truth is that no company is going to develop drivers and put them through quality assurance testing when the operating system isn't even finished yet, thats just a vast waste of resources.
Vista is now in a final release, now Nvidia, ATI, Creative and every other company struggling to meet the driver demand will spend the money to build drivers knowing full well that the operating system won't go through any more major changes that would have effectively burned more cash in re-development.
Blame Microsoft for not having a full driver development specification guide available for these vendors to have been working with. - saigumi, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Same here. I didn't realize that I'd lose SLI on my 2x7800GT when I upgraded. I figured that sometime in the last year nVidia would have figured out how to put that into their driver.
This is business folks and nVidia and ATI know that a good enough chunk of their business and the alpha wolves that recommend product are the same ones that will have Vista Ultimate installed Day 1. Dropping the ball on enthusiast technology is like throwing yourself feet first into a chipper shredder.
Surprisingly, my printer manufacturer has an announced release date for Vista drivers. This is like the first time ever that I have seen this. Heck, it took over half a year for them to get out a set of XP 64-bit drivers and were secretive about that. XP-64bit seems like the black sheep of the family. - DryvBy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3After 2 months of Vista, I'm back in good ol' XP Pro. I'll just wait until this Christmas when I get some new hardware to go back to Vista.
- BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -7/+10Exactly.
I don't get why they're surprised, everyone has been telling them that Vista drivers will suffer from lengthy expensive development cycles, that they will probably suffer from stability problems which lengthens it further, and that undoubtedly they'll have to overcome Vista performance problems, which will lengthen development further.
If you want to buy Vista when all this stuff is common knowledge, and then get upset with someone because the drivers aren't flying out like WinXP drivers, then you should direct your anger at yourself.
If you want to direct your wrath at a company you've paid, direct it at Microsoft. It's them who've introduced the weird spec and the content protection features - which causes development problems big-time, and they sit back while Nvidia and ATi do the work and apparently get sued.
All the Nvidia/ATi/whoever driver developer writers are doing is working 10x as hard and getting the flack for Microsoft's problems. - BlackAdderIII, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5"""You show me where DRM in drivers directly relates to video games not working properly and i'll change my opinion."""
Your opinion that DRM has nothing to do with drivers?
You're free to have that opinion - it's simply a stone cold objective fact that you're wrong. Google is your friend.
As for it "directly relating" to not working in games, well not working is not working, so if crashing the GPU when there is, say, a voltage fluctuation on the card (in order to prevent bus tampering by content pirates, who have never done that anyway as far as I'm aware) of the sort that's quite common doesn't address that, I don't know what does. That will probably amount to unpredictably random crashes - most likely while playing games, watching videos or running 3D screensavers. Overclockers or power gamers can say bye-byes at that point, depending on how their software feels about the voltage stability of their hardware. - Ignotus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Early adopters always get screwed on bugs and performance on just about any software product. I don't know why anyone expected any different with Vista. Any gamer that upgrades to Vista this early needs to have their head examined. Benchmarks were posted before Vista was released stating that current performance suffers a bit. Anyone that spends any time following hardware developments should have known before the upgrade that Vista would be a step backwards, at least in the short term. If you want a card that's compatible with Vista, then the 8800 is that card. Did Nvidia say anything about it performing faster under Vista than it does under XP? I'd always recommend avoiding the first generation release of any new product. 1. You pay a premium to be an early adopter. 2. You get to be a part of the retail beta.
OMG does Creative suck! It's not easy getting Creative sound card drivers & software to work well under older versions of Windows, including XP, let alone Vista. - intense321, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2All a lawsuit will do is slow down production of decent drivers.
- truck87bp, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This class action suit is aimed at the wrong business. Several weeks before Vista release, I warned people that this new software was going to harm manufactures of hardware more than MS. If your going to bring a class action against anyone, I would think it should MS.
Gaming pushes the PC technology, but the OS running it better be as clean as the sheets hanging on the clohes line.
Nvidia has always provided improved drivers, hell, look at what the release numbers are at. I dare say, If you ran out and bought Vista for gaming, its your own dame fault for not reading the Digg's instead of just voting on them. Everyone said to wait before upgrading to Vista. I personally have learned more from the open source group that frequent Digg that the the Windows fans and I'm a windows fan. I also will never buy Vista. - Phocion55, on 10/12/2007, -7/+9@BlackadderIII: Couldn't have put it any better.
I am somewhat mystified by the sudden wave of everyone defending Microsoft for problems that Microsoft itself has caused. - jer2eydevil88, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Funny thing is that the price of a 360 and a hidef tv are about the same as a gaming computer with vista ultimate.
- sworoc, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I think you're pretty confused. Yes, we understand that a game is not DRM content. However, the DRM implementation in the video card driver doesn't magically disappear. You don't have the drivers instantly rewrite themselves when you start or stop using DRM material. So no, they aren't separate issues, because even when DRM content is not being played, code is still in the driver that handles DRM. ***This makes the drivers a whole lot more complicated then they have to be.*** When you can show me a video card from a previous generation that has DRM built-in on the card and how it was a completely separate driver from the driver used for all other gaming applications, then I will agree they are separate issues. If they are a part of the same driver, they will always affect performance.
Oh, and I used all caps cause I thought maybe it would catch your eye enough to read it, instead of blatently digging down everything you don't like. Use google, do some research, something.... - sirmasterboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Yeah, my college gets them through MSDN and they gave me 4 keys so far, i could even get more...
- MrPotato, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I've been running Vista since early November and have experienced some pain that I honestly expected to have with it. For example, I'm running both of my video cards in SLi (no, it's not enabled in the Nvidia control panel...it's not supported yet), I have my motherboard setup for SLi (ASUS A8N SLi Deluxe). The problem ocurrs anytime I attempt to install ANY Nvidia driver on my rig when I reboot I'm greeted with a black screen. Simple solution, revert to the drivers that Vista installed and wait for SLi support from Nvidia. I have a Logitech MX-1000 Laser mouse and there is NO driver support for it from Logitech, at least not yet. So, I have to wait for drivers to appear for a few of my devices and until then, live with what I believe to be Microsoft's best OS to date. Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server 2005 run like a dream on it. Doing web development on it is a pleasure.
Now, what I do have a problem with is the stickers on the boxes that my video cards came in. They say "Vista Ready" and "SLi Ready". I believe Nvidia has a responsibility to say publicly when those of us with SLi machines can expect driver support. Short of that, Vista being out since November not withstanding, it's a new OS and it takes time for drivers to become available. Remember the leap from 98 to Windows 2000? - ViceVirtue, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Sid0, we didn't need brand new drivers for XGL, AIGLX, and subsequently Beryl/Compiz.
Sure they helped, but the 3d desktop linux users have enjoyed for a long time worked before ~~EXT_TEXTURE_FROM_PIXMAP~~ was introduced into the drivers. - jsusanka, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2microsoft is forcing the hardware manufacturers to jump through hoops - I personally hope they lift the middle finger at them and take their good old sweet time.
- totorototoro, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Interesting to see that Apple isn't the only one still working on Vista compliance (with iTunes). Adobe is also still trying to get two products they just released compatible as well, and now Nvidia too?
- BionicAntboy, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Will everyone bitching about the DRM in a faulty DRIVER issue shut the hell up already? The DRM in Vista has NOTHING to do with the game performance. That doesn't mean the DRM issue doesn't suck, but I'm not gonna bitch about the mileage my car gets in a thread about faulty steering power windows.
The Nvidia drivers are causing problems in games, not with the Vista desktop, so labeling the cards "Vista Ready" etc., is perfectly cromulent in legal speak. I've not experienced any problems with a 7900 in Vista, but did see HL2 kick back out to the desktop with a "recovered from..." error.
Maybe the 'vocal gamers' will be lucky enough to get a judge/jury as ignorant as the one that sentenced that substitute teacher to 40 years in prison for porn pop ups on a school computer. Then again, maybe these 'vocal gamers' should have been paying attention to all the gaming/tech sites like Tom's, Extreme, Anandtech etc ad nauseum, that have forewarned about performance issues and Nvidia cards, then they wouldn't get their collective panties in a class action bunch. But then again no one ever guaranteed that 'vocal gamers' = intelligent gamers.
In other words, report issues to Nvidia, and wait for new drivers. Practically speaking, it's not as if Nvidia's going to ignore the Vista gamer market, and their track record for driver updates is at least as good (actually better) than ATI's over the past few years. Vista is a major upgrade, and early adopters are going to expect growing pains. There's no way around it.
I've dugg all you DRM whiners down, so feel free to retaliate! - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2you weren't getting double performance with two cards. Am I the only one wondering why gamers are running vista 32bit? The mainline version is 64bit now and I've been waiting a while to use a 64bit processor, whats with all the laggers?
- zaul32, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm glad someone is wasting their time with a law suit. I was afraid they might be working on their drivers.
- BionicAntboy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ ignotus: "I'd always recommend avoiding the first generation release of any new product."
You and most enthusiast sites. :) I don't recall a single tech/gaming site that recommended upgrading to Vista for the hardcore gamer. Most, in fact, highly recommended holding off. - sworoc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I'm pretty sure you DON'T KNOW WHAT THE HELL YOU'RE TALKING ABOUT....
nah, he didn't hear me. The DRM is being implemented on the card, this is something completely new. The drivers for these cards are having to handle that new element. Every video device is required to implement this in order to work under Vista... at all. Not just for premium video content. So yes, the DRM implementation ON the video card is affecting the driver performance, because Vista requires it to be a part of the driver.
You can digg down all the "DRM whiners" but that doesn't mean you know ***** about what you're talking about. -
Show 51 - 100 of 108 discussions
Browsing Digg on your phone just got easier with our enhancements to the 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is