Nvidia: We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista Driver Development

by Anton Shilov
04/12/2007 | 10:42 PM

An official from Nvidia, a leading designer of system chipsets and graphics processors, admitted that the company had underestimated resources it needed to develop proper drivers for Windows Vista, but said the issues would be shortly resolved. Besides, the company has outlined its priorities when developing drivers for the new operating system (OS).

Several days after Microsoft Windows Vista operating system was released, hundreds of end-users reported complaints about instabilities, erratic behaviour, driver bugs and other kind of issues that they faced because of Nvidia’s ForceWare drivers designed for the new OS. End-users with various graphics cards, including the latest top-of-the-range GeForce 8800-series, criticized Nvidia ForceWare for poor performance and stability, something, which logotype “Vista Ready” is not meant to say.

One person, who wanted to remain fully anonymous, even launched a web-site called NvidiaClassAction.org in early February to collect the information about ForceWare issues with Windows Vista, however, in early March the web-site has been taken down due to an unknown reason.

Nearly two months have passed since the last WHQL-certified release of Windows Vista ForceWare drivers and there is a number of end-users who still experience issues with their machines and the GeForce graphics cards. But Nvidia’s Keita Iada, who is responsible for content development at the company, said in an interview with IGN web-site that the new drivers are near.

“We’re ramping up the frequency of our Vista driver releases. Users will probably understand that we release a number of beta drivers on our site, so we're making incremental progress. We believe that, in a very short time we will have addressed the vast majority, if not all of the issues. We’ve had teams who were working on other projects who have mobilised to make sure that as quickly as possible we have the drivers fixed. I’m not going to give you an exact timeframe, but it’s going to be very soon,” said Mr. Iada.

The director of content management at Nvidia also explained the reasons why the ForceWare drivers appear to have issues with the new operating system by Microsoft. According to him, the first priority for the company was to enable content developers with ability to create titles for DirectX 10, which is strategically important for the company. As a consequence, the firm underestimated resources it needed to design drivers for end-users.

“On a high level, we had to prioritise. In our case, we have DX9, DX10, multiple APIs, Vista and XP – the driver models are completely different, and the DX9 and 10 drivers are completely different. Then you have single- and multi-card SLI - there are many variables to consider. Given that we were so far ahead with DX10 hardware, we’ve had to make sure that the drivers, although not necessarily available to a wide degree, or not stable, were good enough from a development standpoint,” Mr. Iada said.

But even though the initial priority of Nvidia when developing drivers were content developers, right now the company has the priority of delivering stable drivers for Vista to end-users. It is remarkable that Nvidia even put performance of its drivers on the second place.

“We’ve had to balance our priorities between making sure we have proper DX10 feature-supported drivers to facilitate development of DX10 content, but also make sure that the end user will have a good experience on Vista. To some degree, I think that we may have underestimated how many resources were necessary to have a stable Vista driver off the bat. I can assure you and your readers that our first priority right now is not performance, not anything else; it is stability and all the features supported on Vista,” the director of content management at Nvidia added.