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#71
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NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista Driver Development"
"FoolsGold" wrote in message
joey wrote: [...] There are important operating system changes that facilitate DX10. I don't know how much the audience here knows about operating system design, but it is fair to say it is substantial. To make it brief, I do not think DX10 is possible on XP without a HUGE service pack that would effectively replace the operating system kernel (making it a completely new OS version). Such an effort is extremely costly for MS, and its unlikely in my opinion that they will ever make such a dramatic "patch" for XP, because a patch implies they are providing a huge amount of development dollars (millions) to the general public for free. Not a smart move for any company -- best to make it a feature of the next version of the OS which includes some other things users might be willing to pay for -- and, if they aren't willing to pay for an upgrade to their current PC, they are sure to get it installed for them on their next new PC purchase. It's still a "lock-in" feature no matter which way you cut it. MS could get DX10 to work in XP if they wanted to (****, they MADE DirectX, they can get it to work wherever they want), but of course their business model requires people to get forced onto another OS just for one little feature, otherwise they won't move willingly. DX10 is closely tied to Vista's new driver model which is radically different to XP's. As joey correctly noted, retrofitting DX10 would require a massive rewrite of XP, which MS are obviously unwilling to do since they've made it clear it has no future. Separating the driver model into admin and user components is an important step forward, with consequences for stability and security that go way beyond just being able to run DX10 games. In five years time anyone silly enough to be reading these archives will be wondering what the fuss was about. |
#72
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NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista Driver Development"
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. |
#73
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NVIDIA: "We Underestimated Necessary Resources for Vista Driver Development"
Somewhere in all the above it says the problem Nvidia is having writing
drivers for Vista is not because of Vista. What a hoot. That's like saying the problem with earthquakes isn't all the shaking ground. |
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