My observation, having tried beta testing Vista, was that drivers that
worked in the beta did not always work in the final version. For some of my
hardware I tried to install the beta drivers and they didn't work at all.
However, in some cases I could install Windows 2003 x64 drivers that worked
perfectly. Obviously there were numerous changes made to the final release
of Vista which necessitated overhauls of the drivers.

"Walter Mitty" wrote in message
...
Stephan Rose writes:

Frank wrote:

AirRaid wrote:


Nvidia Names Stability as Top Priority for Windows Vista Drivers

[ 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.


http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/video/d...412224213.html


Glad to hear this is not a Vista problem as some here said it was and
hoped it was. It's also amazing nvidia couldn't get a proper driver
since beta's of Vista have been available for over a year!
Thankfully I use only ATI and Matrox cards.

Actually it's not very amazing Frank. Developers generally don't devote
resources to beta-applications. Especially not when it's called windows
and
released by Microsoft considering their history of constantly delaying
final release.

The nature of beta-software is that *anything* can change *anywhere* at
*anytime*. The result of this is, and this is not MS specific, is that if
the company who owns the beta product decides to make a change somewhere
because it needs to for their own reasons, that all of a sudden days,
weeks, or more worth of work can be lost by work from other companies
dependant on what was changed.

This is not entirely true. There can, of course, be changes but the fact
that it is in Beta usually indicates a functionality freeze and the
alpha version has been past. It is very, very rare to see major changes
from a beta to a major release.


On top of that, in this particular scenario...you have to add in that the
drivers work completely different and a completely new and differently
working API was in the mix as well. Any of it subject to change at any
moment during the beta phase.

Very unlikely. The fact it is beta almost guarantees a relatively
concreate API suite.


So basically the bottom line is this. Until a product gets out of beta
and
is released, developers cannot with confidence base their work on the
beta
product.

Nothing is ideal. But developers ALWAYS work with beta and pre-releases
in order to get there product compatible with the new version.


And in case of MS, I've even seen them drop beta's entirely in the middle
of
it! Managed DirectX 2.0 comes to mind which was dropped out of the clear
blue sky for the XNA Framework. Now imagine what something like that
would
do to a developer creating work based on MDX2.0. It would be disastrous
and
that's why developers don't do it.

Developers do it all the time. Sure this is an example of something
begin dropped - it happens. Such is life.


Being a software developer for a living myself I can't say I can blame
them.

I disagree wholeheartedly with your general comments. SW Development
companies are always working with betas and pre-releases of products in
order to familiarise themselves and get their related SW
integrated. Yes, there can be upsets - it is, after all, SW. When the
company changes the API in the beat because of otherwise unsolvable bugs
one just has to bite the bullet. It is the nature of SW development.