MS: Nvidia Drivers Caused 29% of Vista Crashes

no problems in any games in vista... of course i have 4gb of ram, which u should have at least if ur gaming on vista

I like vista.

There.

This just in... Vista is responsible for 100% of Vista crashes.

Before you ATI fanboys start rejoicing, this isn't exactly just black and white. Speaking with someone reiable that I know at Microsoft, the intial cause of this issue was as EvilAsh state, because Nvidia did not expect Microsoft to ship Vista within the time frame that they did. Nvidia had slacked off with supporting Vista while ATI started from the get go. Their initial drivers were horrible but at time went they have gotten much better. This report also an unspecified period. There are so many factors that deeply involve this that you can't really say that it's because of just one factor. I'm not claiming to be an expert or even an advanced user by any means, but I am fairly educated on the matter.

I've been running Vista for a little short of 2 months along with Forceware 169.32 on an EVGA 8800 GT and have run Half Life 2, Crysis, Sins, UT3, Supreme Commander, WoW, C&C3, Frontlines, GRAW, The Witcher, FEAR, WH40K: Dawn of War, and Company of Heroes, all without as much as a crash or even any graphical oddities. I've never had any major issues with Vista either. My father had been running it for over a year on a Sony Viao with very little trouble as well. I often wonder what other factors are the cause of many of the issues that people are claiming, since several of my friends are running Vista as well and they've have very good experience with Vista and Nvidia as well.

I'm sure a lot of people don't update their video card drivers too, something else to keep in mind.

Maybe Vista couldn't handle the instructions given by the drivers because it is a buggy and unstable system. It takes two to tango, Billy! Work closer with Nvidia next time before you cram an apple-wannabe OS down our throats :D

And I was wondering why my vista performance index thing lowered when I updated my drivers... sheesh..

Given Microsoft's standard practices concerning crash dump analysis, this does not surprise me in the least. Cracks me up.

Shame ATI drivers are still pisspoor under linux. NVidia have got them beat easy there.

(Coming from an owner of both ATI/NVidia cards, and cant say I have experienced problems with either card under Vista.)

Never had crashes with vista with any of my Ati products. I just happened to have an ati product because at the time I got my 1950 it was on sale and suprise a few months later I was testing vista..and Suprise again ATi's drivers were stable. And generally they continue to be.
Nvidia was solely concentrating on windows xp and Dx9. Ati looked to the future.
Everyone bashed Vista. and said it sucked.. but it was the xp gaming nvidiots who were having the majority of the issues. it continues now ati's drivers continue to get better.. and they even support 10.1 but the nvidiots still bash them again.

I would rather have steady and stable with nice graphics then buggy as hell bleeding edge crap.

the only thing that's causing my nvidia/vista setup to crash is god damn hl2.exe. Every time i quit tf2 or dare to continue doing what i'm doing after i click on it's icon. dear valve, fix this

Ok, what I'm wondering is, those who installed vista and went back to xp, did you go back due to crashes or just due to everything running alot worse under vista than xp?

That is pretty shockingly bad for Nvidia. Not that it's going to affect their market position but damn guys.

ati + vista and I'm having very few crashes.

stfu MS and help them fix it

FWIW, in XP I've run several NVidia and several ATi products and the ATi drivers and cards always produced a nicer color saturation in their display rendering but had consistently less stable / more buggy drivers. That was sort of the unspoken trade-off to running ATi cards right up until a couple years ago. You'd get a nicer rendering but there was a more likely chance it would crash the game or reboot/lockup your system than an NVidia card and driver.

In the half day I had Vista installed on my computer (NVIDIA graphics card), I had zero crashes.

I get this "Display driver stopped working..." all the time, while gaming, gets really annoying. It's so annoying I put XP on my other computer to be able to play games normally. This aside, I really have no complains over Vista.

And yes more peeps have nvidia cards, however this crap was happening all the time on both my vista machines, both running nvidia cards, so nvidia drivers really are shit to me atm. Can't say about ATI tho.

if you check out steam survey nvidia has 66% of the video card market and ATI has 30%
gives you an idea of why nvidia has more failures

Well, nvidia is usually pretty good with drivers so I would assume the driver crashers were do to vista not having a good SDK, or no help from MS, some crappy vista systems the driver interacts with etc as MS has a worse track record than nvidia by far.

Back before Vista was released, as well as shortly afterwards, I went and tested most of the games I had worked on under Vista with both ATI and nVidia cards and at least for the Vista drivers, I noticed a bit of a trend.

ATI's drivers were the more compatible and stable of the two, but at the cost of performance. nVidia's drivers were extremely fast, but at the cost of stability. The generic Microsoft drivers were usually a mix.

These results do map with what was being seen early on in Vista's release.

Good old blame game, kinda hard to make good drivers for new products on a system that could of spent another 2 years in development. Hey but ATI doesn't have those issues since they've been repackaging all their old cards as "new". ATI probably has some of the worst drivers around as in game support (always 2 months late in updates), and Nvidia on the other hand has solid drivers, even their beta drivers are solid. So all i can pull from this article is that Vista "the new kid" with all the new fancy features can't support the new technology, but is able to support last gen gear? Xp for the win?

: D

On a side note, ATI went cost effective cards for a reason, they know they have no chance to catchup( Amd's fault not ATI's fault) and now that Nvidia bought Ageia with plans to incorporate it into all cuda cards (8Series +) really makes ATI kinda unapealing, even their budget cards are getting beat now by the 8800gt and the 9600gt with future on board physics with a simple "solid" driver update.

i'm guessing that "unspecified" amount of time was a week...

Hopefully Nvidia will do something about it. I'm back on the nvidia bandwagon after several years with an ati card, but their drivers only get better.

All this really does is show how that even though their drivers might not be up to snuff, they clearly are offering a better product - crashes be damned.