Display driver recovery ​notificatio​ns. Ouch.

I found this blog post this morning, and it seems like a horrible issue to encounter - is this a result of poor video drivers (my first thought), or is Vista being over-zealous with its notifications?

Jack Cade wrote:

I found this blog post this morning, and it seems like a horrible issue to encounter - is this a result of poor video drivers (my first thought), or is Vista being over-zealous with its notifications?

You get a notification for each time the driver crashes. 50 crashes = 50 notifications. If you close the offending application that crashes the driver the notifications should stop.

Still, 50 messages is somewhat over the top.. as suggested it may be nice if the messages in these instances were checked against displayed (or que to display) and rather than adding another message, simply adapt the previous message.

Why blame Vista? I'd blame the video card drivers. Don't shoot the messenger.

True, but Vista could control the user experience of this much better (since the driver is asking 'Vista' to display these notices).

stevo_ wrote:

True, but Vista could control the user experience of this much better (since the driver is asking 'Vista' to display these notices).

I would agree there. If it sees the same device repeatedly faulting, it should just display a single error "This device has failed multiple times..." At the most, the user should only have to click twice; once for the initial error, and again for the warning about multiple errors. Forcing them to click through 50 times is just ridiculous.

That said, it's pretty clear that the drivers being released by nVidia and ATI are extraordinarily craptastic for gamers. They seem to be fine for typical business use, but if you use your system for gaming, do not upgrade to Vista until stable, working drivers are generally available out there and avoid beta drivers like the plague that they are. You're only asking for pain. The general issue with drivers is also not related strictly to video drivers; you should read Creative's Vista forum. Folks are livid about the dysfunctional state of their audio drivers.

Microsoft needs to pull out the big stick and start beating on these hardware manufacturers. How the heck they can have WHQL certified drivers that crash, sometimes taking the entire system with them?

What kills me is that it's not like the release date for Vista was this big secret and on January 30th, Microsoft jumped out of a box and yelled "Surprise!" And still, the most that they can offer are these steaming piles that they euphamistically refer to as "device drivers" for their (very expensive) hardware. And who gets blamed for the system problems? Microsoft.
 
Not that I have an opinion about all this or anything.

My display driver restarted two or three times now, never seen that toaster.

[A]

What really suprises me is the number of people with these kinds of posts, either I am out of the norm, or I am just having extremely good luck. In two years of having this software in various forms I have never experienced things like this. I have also played WoW and SWG on it and never had any of these difficulties especially with my Nvidia GeForce 6800gs or my ATI 9550 or All-In-Wonder 2006. My sound driver works very well now.  I wonder what else might be loaded on their system as well. Very curious..

 

Even for folks that aren't crashing, the nVidia drivers for Vista are giving a lot of people horrible framerates. And nVidia knows there's a problem, but it doesn't sound like they know exactly what it is; all there is to be heard from them is corporate-speak platitudes about how they're "committed" to supporting Vista. Like they have an option if they want to keep on selling their GPUs.

The excuses have mutated from "It's a beta release", to "I hasn't been released to the general public" to "It's just been released". What are they going to say six months from now? It's not our fault, our building exploded? A dog ate the source listings and our flash keys?

For their part, Microsoft shouldn't allow any of these drivers to be WHQL certified unless they're stable and benchmarks show similar performance to the equivalent driver for the same hardware under XP. Releasing a Vista driver that's 20% slower than the XP version for the same GPU is simply unacceptable, and should be considered a defect.

mstefan wrote:

For their part, Microsoft shouldn't allow any of these drivers to be WHQL certified unless they're stable and benchmarks show similar performance to the equivalent driver for the same hardware under XP. Releasing a Vista driver that's 20% slower than the XP version for the same GPU is simply unacceptable, and should be considered a defect.

Easier said than done. The Windows XP drivers have 7 YEARS of optimizations put into them (since they were a logical continuation of the Windows 2000 drivers). Vista with it's new driver model as well as freshly built DirectX 10 API will take quite some time to optimize properly. I have hopes that it'll reach the Windows XP performance in a few months though.

Stebet wrote:

Easier said than done. The Windows XP drivers have 7 YEARS of optimizations put into them (since they were a logical continuation of the Windows 2000 drivers). Vista with it's new driver model as well as freshly built DirectX 10 API will take quite some time to optimize properly. I have hopes that it'll reach the Windows XP performance in a few months though.

Taking off my developer hat, and putting on my end-user hat, my response to this would be: too bad, not my problem. If it takes a few more months for them to release optimized drivers, then they'll get their WHQL certification in a few months. Until then, they should be clearly marked as beta drivers, which they are. For example, there is no way that the ForceWare 97.46 drivers should be marked as "certified for Windows Vista". The same goes for Creative's X-Fi drivers which were "released" after disabling a bunch of features.