NVidia makes Vista unsecure (again)

Having entirely failed to provide adequate video drivers for Vista, NVidia is now going backwards by ensuring that the drivers that you do have allow kernel access to Windows Vista.

Well done NVidia.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/security/?p=447&tag=nl.e622

Oh, that's funny, one more reason for never again buying an ATI graphics adapter (they suck).

Dodo wrote:

Oh, that's funny, one more reason for never again buying an ATI graphics adapter (they suck).

Actually the flaw was in nVidia drivers, not ATI's so it's a reason more to stay away from nVidia. and also ATI drivers are far more stable than the buggy mess nVidia is releasing (both for chipsets and videocards).

BTW the ati 2600xt is very competitively priced against the 8600gts and performs better in most areas (and also has free hardware acceleration for videos, unlike nvidia that forces you to pay for their (much slower) accelerated codecs).

Dodo wrote:

Oh, that's funny, one more reason for never again buying an ATI graphics adapter (they suck).

Reading. Is. Fundamental.



(ps: ATI >> nVidia)

PaoloM wrote:

(ps: ATI >> nVidia)

not when talking about high-end cards: even the scarily ginormous 2900xtx is completely humiliated by the nvidia 8800 gtx. the only ATI solution worth buying is the 2600xt that by the way is also the only one supporting HDCP over dual-link monitors (for example the 3007WFP-HC with 2560x1600 resolution)

It's funny how quickly everyone forgets that ATI’s drivers were also afflicted with a similar vulnerability.

codan wrote:



It's funny how quickly everyone forgets that ATI’s drivers were also afflicted with a similar vulnerability.

Oh nobody forgets that. It's just that ATI had great performing drivers on Vista's launch, while nVidia ones are still crap.

They both had access to the same resources, one did good, one did nothing.

Chinmay007 wrote:



No thank you, I wouldn't touch ATI cards with a 10 foot poll.

My experiences with ATI had always been flawless (starting with an old Rage Pro, going thru 7000, 7500, 9500pro, 9700, 9800pro and now two x1300) while nVidia was a total pain in both hardware and drivers (my ex-wife had artifacts in WoW with her 6800 -I think- while I stopped caring when my 5200 crapped itself after two months).

PaoloM wrote:



codan wrote:  It's funny how quickly everyone forgets that ATI’s drivers were also afflicted with a similar vulnerability.

Oh nobody forgets that. It's just that ATI had great performing drivers on Vista's launch, while nVidia ones are still crap.

They both had access to the same resources, one did good, one did nothing.

Very true. It has to be said that there is very little that makes me genuinely angry, but my nVidia "Certified for Windows Vista" graphics card not having proper 100% working drivers - x86 works mostly, but x64, don't think about it
The way nVidia just generally treat people with inbuilt cards in a laptop  I think is appalling, particularly if these people are paying customers.
And to be honest I think nVidia are just dishonest to sell anything that doesn't work properly on Windows Vista as "ready for Windows Vista."

The flaw is in nTune which is not part of Nvidia's drivers.

evildictaitor wrote:

And to be honest I think nVidia are just dishonest to sell anything that doesn't work properly on Windows Vista as "ready for Windows Vista."

If they were Microsoft or Apple the class action lawsuits would be flying left and right.

PaoloM wrote:



Chinmay007 wrote:  No thank you, I wouldn't touch ATI cards with a 10 foot poll.

My experiences with ATI had always been flawless (starting with an old Rage Pro, going thru 7000, 7500, 9500pro, 9700, 9800pro and now two x1300) while nVidia was a total pain in both hardware and drivers (my ex-wife had artifacts in WoW with her 6800 -I think- while I stopped caring when my 5200 crapped itself after two months).

QFT, I've gone through a few cards, ATI, nVidia and even Matrox back in the day.

The only cards I've ever had problems with have been nVidia.

Also, I've had motherboards based on AMD, nvidia, VIA and Intel chipsets at one point or another - likewise the nvidia chipset is still causing me problems.

They may have some of the best hardware engineers in the world, but their quality guys are clearly all asleep.

First of all nTune are not the Nvidia Video drivers. They're part of Nvidia's overclocking and system monitoring suite and not video cards (except for overclocking purposes) and they are certainly not necessary to run your system.

Second, I and several other people i know that have 8500, 8600 or 8800 Nvidia cards have had next to ZERO problems on Vista for several months now.

People with older cards might have some problems though, but understandably Nvidia have focused their driver development on the 8X00 series. The same thing applies to Ati where a friend of mine that as a ATI 1950XT card has has nothing but problems both with 3D applications as well as video hardware acceleration.

Stebet wrote:

People with older cards might have some problems though, but understandably Nvidia have focused their driver development on the 8X00 series. The same thing applies to Ati where a friend of mine that as a ATI 1950XT card has has nothing but problems both with 3D applications as well as video hardware acceleration.

I have an X1950XT, in Vista x64, and zero problems.

My experience mirrors that of some of the others here. nVidia have been nothing but trouble (people who claim their Vista drivers are bad obviously weren't around during the Win2k beta; those were even worse!), while ATI has always worked flawless for me.

Sven Groot wrote:

I have an X1950XT, in Vista x64, and zero problems.

My experience mirrors that of some of the others here. nVidia have been nothing but trouble (people who claim their Vista drivers are bad obviously weren't around during the Win2k beta; those were even worse!), while ATI has always worked flawless for me.

Weird. I think a lot of this might have to do with the chipsets as well though. I do know that Nvidia has sucked when it comes to chipset support in Vista, but most people i know with Nvidia cards and Vista don't have any problems at all.

This one friend of mine is running Vista x86 though but i don't think that makes any difference (and personally i'd find it rather strange if the x64 drivers were better than the x86 drivers).

Over the years i've found that most of my "inexplicable" problems have been due to crappy motherboards. That's why i've stuck with the high-end Abit and MSI boards lately, i haven't had a single problem with them.

I dont know though that Nvidia's SLI support is rather craptastic but neither me or any of my friends has such a setup so that might explain something as well.

*shrug* the mysteries of drivers never cease to amaze me.

I have an 8800GTS and I'm still using the old 158.24 Vista 32bit drivers and it seems to work very well. I'm not going to update the drivers until I really need to.
I played the BioShock demo last night using those old drivers even though most people are saying that you really should install the newest beta Vista drivers and it seems to work fine.

SLI, on the other hand, is more trouble that it's worth so I'm not messing with that.

I have to say my most serious problems (completely nuked system) have been from nvidia chipset drivers being rubbish (in that, not one single driver would support booting off a SATA RAID array, they'd all install fine, and then fail to boot.). The graphics drivers are slightly more reliable.

That said, none of the Vista graphics drivers have worked except the ones which were downloaded from windows update on install.

I'm using Vista x64, and the graphics card is a 7800GTX, which is hardly ancient history. It's even more annoying because I can no longer play fable (thanks nvidia!)

So in short, when asked I'd never ever ever recommend nvidia to anyone.