June Vista crash numbers leak

i run vista 32 with a nvidia 8800gtx. although they post drivers every month, including A LOT of beta ones (supporting their newest creations), i haven't upgraded since earlier this year. No crashes or BSODs yet and my vista reliability rating has been a cool 10.0 for some time now.

I'm no fan of Nvidia, but shouldn't crash statistics be normalized by market share?

I'm an ATI Fan so this article finaly makes me comfortable with my standing. However, i'm sure ATI has a lot less market share than Nvidia, how *could* the crash reports look if they had the same market share? I would love for someone to work this out and post it!

hmm, although that doesn't sound particularly like an ATI fan now does it? Mabe i'm just a fan of fair play!

That doesn't make sense as they can't perform worth a damn. So, I would say any crashing on Intel IGP's would be next to nil. Then, take in Nvidia's market share and compare it next to a company who's chips people do play games on. What do we end up with? Yes Charlie, we can play with the numbers to. 
LOL, he can't even say "Nvidia' drivers have improved.", but does manage to squeak out, "they blow less". There may be hope for you yet. I recommend Yoga for your tension. Cheers.

how many vistaians out there are using intel vs nvidia vs ati for graphics? if the distribution is not uniform it might put the crash numbers in a different perspective...

Sure you can sugar coat some number, but its not going to change the report. Why is it charlies fault that MS didn't release market share data? The data is there the facts are there, either way its bad for nvidia. I would suspect that intel has the biggest market, while nvidia and AMD has a little which makes it worse for nvidia. If you take it from a gaming perspective (if for some odd reason vista is a gamebox? and there are no other reasons to upgrade) then nvida probly has majority market share, then it looks even worse for nvidia.

And the fanboys cometh....

My laptop has Intel IGP. Never crashed while gaming (yes I game on my intel IGP laptop. No, not Crysis or Fear, but game nonetheless). My system has only crashed twice in a year while gaming, both while using the NV IGP. Since adding an ATI card, no crashes. How many of these broken OS systems tested were properly optimized? Few people even know how to optimize Vista. Still, the statistics sound right to me. NV blows. ATI Rules. WHAT?

Nvidia's graphics card drivers have never caused me any grief in the last two p-cs I've had. However, since I've had a new desktop pc/Vista OS with an Ati graphics card, I've had around 8 BSODs, and pop-ups informing me that the graphics driver has recovered from a crash. And yes, these were with updated and the latest 'n' greatest drivers. Not good enough ATi!!!

I adopted vista fairly early on and when I was using older machine with a 6800GT card. It performed horridly, it would frequently lock to a black screen only for vista to resurrect about 20 seconds later with a "The display driver had to be restarted" message.

I rolled back to XP for awhile and waited for vista to get bet driver support etc. nvidia's drivers improved but it still had problems. I upgraded my machine around march this year (major overhaul, everything was 100% new for a change) and slapped an 8800GTX in there. Nowhere near as bad as the 6800GT but with the odd bluescreen. I know windows will always have that 'bluescreen lol' stigma attached but honestly I hadn't even seen a bluescreen since winXP SP1 came out (apart from one occaision due to faulty ram, hardly the OSs fault).

I've found the crashes to relate a lot to what game I'm playing. Crysis ran ok for the most part, seem to remember one or two lock ups.. Stalker Clear Sky on the other hand is horrid, I get bluescreens from nvidia's drivers every 30-45minutes of play. I've since given up on nvidia's shoddyness and have a 4870x2 arriving sometime this afternoon.

Honestly vista's been out awhile now and nvidia's drivers are still performing worse than creative's... And THATS saying something. ;)

.. that people are saying that the crash statistics should be weighted by manufacturer. This rather misses the point NO single system component manufacturer should be responsible for 1/3rd of crashes. Think of how many other components there are in a modern desktop machine: memory controller, memory, network interface, USB controller, PCI-E controller, disk controller, disks themselves, sound, keyboard, mouse etc. That 1/3 of crashes are coming from graphics card drivers is bad enough, but from a single manufacturer, that is terrible.

I have XP on a older P3 3.06 and a HD3850 agp card from ATI and I spent 3 hours yesterday reinstalling the initial Sapphire drivers because the newer Sapphire drivers would not work as well for me. The older Sapphire drivers run all but Oblivion and Secondlife.
Good to hear that Nvidia drivers on Vista are not perfect. Why is this though. Has gaming on a PC become too complicated with too many options. 
Is this a argument for consoles like xbox360 and PS3 or the highly underpowered and way over rated Wii.

Oh Charlie your a secret nVidia fan arent you, go on you can admit it.

This is just about raw numbers.I don't think Microsoft need to tell you (or can possibly tell you) how you interprate these numbers.

For me , the biggest turkey is Intel. For even showing up in this list they should be ashamed.
Intel gfx chips don't generally do much.They are not state of the art and Intel can not get rock solid drivers built there products.Despite huge resources and manpower that simply dwarfs the competition, Intel continue to fail at all sorts of drivers.


It would be nice to normalize the results with market share, but I don't think that's gonna be accurate. Intel has the biggest chunk of graphic market shared, and yet, still under nVidia with Vista related crashes.

From the Valve survey (http://www.steampowered.com/status/survey.html) the DX10 video cards used on Vista:

148,728 nVidia
22,741 ATI

Of course, who knows about non-DX10 cards on Vista. However, normalized that gives us:

nVidia market share: 148,728 / 22,741 = 6.54
Therefore, 48% / 6.54 = 7.34%

This reads: If your crash rate is 7.34% on Vista but you have 6.54 times the market share, it will appear that you cause crashes 48% of the time *compared to your competitor*.

An actual user will experience less crashes with an nvidia DX10 card on Vista than an ATI DX10.

(Remember: This does not take into account non-DX10 cards, which may or may not crash as often.)

I've run Vista for a good chunk of time now. To say Vista is "the broken OS", in any form is pandering to apple fanbois. I've run most all OSes and Vista is solid. Vista does not crash. Vista is a pleasure to work with. I don't work for Microsoft. I live in Richardson, TX and I sell security solutions. Apple is a fine company, I own their phone, but to say Vista is a broken OS is like saying I was unable to read this "broken" article. If nVidia is breaking Vista, please place the blame where it belongs. nVidia can pass WHQL just like everyone else. I mean, my God, they have enough driver writers over there. They seem to be saving money on skipping WHQL if their drivers aren't certified. I'm guessing anyway.

Steam survey results should be taken as a grain of salt, it doesn't prove anything, there's a lot of cards that aren't there and have you seen the "unknown" numbers posted there, is simply unreliable. Today's gamers buy powerful cards to play powerful games at ultra high resolutions, and most results of steam are based on people who play on Counter Strike Source (Those servers are always full) , of course that's a game that wouldn't crash even an Intel IGP. In reality, Intel has the biggest market share in graphics because most of their Chipsets ships with their integrated graphic core (Even if it's disabled), remember that the market were the money is isn't in the high end, is in the mainstream with cards like 9600GT, HD 3850 and below.

Vista is used for more than just playing games! Your assertion that the Valve population that took the survey extends as a trend across the rest of Vista computers is patently absurd. Guess what? My company's computers all use nVidia GPUs, so why even bother with the Intel and ATI numbers? They must be inferior because my sample population dictates so! That means, that those two losers that are using intel and ATI chipsets really must be hating their life because 99.99% of the population experiences only twice the errors that their sorry asses do. 

See how I can use that same line of logic to prove that nVidia drivers are superior? Not to mention that my machine has contributed to at least a dozen (not rounding up here, rounding down) BSODs due to crappy graphics drivers, and I don't even game on it!

Wow, what a revelation - someone that actually works on their Vista machine!

What were you trying to prove us Charlie? That you're an ATI fanboy? Tell us something new.

As it's been pointed out, if NV cards are much more widely used in Vista (DX10), it's pretty natural that they have more crashes too. So the FUD didn't work this time. Wonder, what's the next plan in the series of trying to bring NV down?

I wonder how many of the nVidia "crashes" are due to hardware problems. I heard somewhere that nVidia might have a couple of chips out there that might have issues...

From what I have gathered, MS's implementation of DRM and other unwanted "requirements" in the Vista OS has made driver production a nightmare. While some may say that programmers need to just adapt and learn the new programming methods for driver production on this OS, you have to wonder whether it is worth it to make a driver better than "it generally works" on an OS as unpopular as Vista. Microsoft now knows the growing pains of Linux where the unpopular kid gets less attention.

No doubt Nvidia and ATI are responsiblie for a lot of graphic driver based crashes, but they can't compare to the crashes caused by all forms of Windows or Vista. 

Nvidia has a lot of problems and drivers are just one of many. For me Microsucks should spend a lot more time fixing their defective O/S. Touting Nvidia's driver problems doesn't fix the monumental broken parts of Vista or Windows.

I can say for mayself having 8800GT. And i reala get a looot crashes, ryed switching drivers but it didn't help. But 99% of th e time driver crashes only for 1 sec and that the screen comes back on, though i get around 5 BSOD in a year. Actualy most fo them were caused lately, cause i think i have too weak power suply :P

im starting to think its not the cards fault any more. i built my pc from the bottom up from components of thermaltake and a x38-dq6 main board with the so called dreaded ati 2900xt i have my vista copy heavily modifide to bypass all malware at 64bit.have this set up running around 20 hours a day, since the card got released to finish the rig. never one crash so far.<.< i think its the mother boards you guys are ushually careless about and power supply.check the brand if it has any :P

Like Tenticles comment I also run Vista 32 (Ultimate) on an 8800GTX although I did reinstall vista earlier this month but not because of constant crashing. Vista has and continues to be very stable. I do wonder though, all those driver/vendor crashes ar perhaps not a result of poor driver programming but because of poor games programming. If a game crashes while running it's entirely likely windows will report the driver as the culprit and not the game itself...this go along way to explaining the high instance of nvidia/ATI results. Perhaps Microsoft could do itself a favour by changing the way vista reports a crash by including what application / game was using that driver at the time of the crash.



Outraged people, if you don't enjoy the reading, do something else that will do you some good. Your words won't change the inq way. The most funny part of every article is to see people go crazy and salivating with hate. I'm laughing at you, I'm pretty sure the Inq staff is laughing too. Now there is even "Mr. ATI Fanboy", of course defending Nvidia from this foul attack...

If 98% of an OS's crashes are video related, divided rather roughly by the market share of people gaming with three brands of graphics chips, then logically it's probably not any of their faults. Logically, the best place to look for the problem would be something like the DirectX libraries from Microsoft.

I point the finger at MS for the crashes. They're responsible for none of the SLI/Crossfire being able to work when Vista was released (you ran a story on the Vista code being broken). I occasionally game on my Linux box and have been running NVIDIA and Linux almost exclusively since early 2001, often with beta drivers. Aside from hardware problems, I've only had one or two problems with my video.

Even if all the graphics code from MS is completely bug free (highly unlikely), that doesn't let them off the hook. If your libraries are so strange and complicated that no one can program with them, then it's your fault for writing such bad libraries. I've programmed in C++ for both Linux and Microsoft. While most of the stuff is the same, system specific code is generally tons cleaner and simpler with Linux. I'm surprised that anyone still writes software for Windows.

NVIDIA has 48% of crashes and owns 70% of Market Share.

AT has 19% of crashes and owns 30% of Market Share.

Captain Obvious tells us 48/70 = 70% and 19/30 = 63%

The difference isn't there anymore.

For you dummies out there whinging about market share, the results are normalised, if you don't what that means (which you obviously don't if you bleated about market share) then I suggest you go read a book on maths before you open your mouth further and look even more like a bunch of tw*ts.

So you *think* that 48% of vista's crashes orriginating from video problems are contributed to nvidia, huh?

10 Bucks says 100% of those crashes would stop if said users switched to XP. 

But then that *doesn't* paint nvidia out to be the devil, now does it, charlie?

What would be more important is the proportion of OS/MB/GPU combination being affected. Vista usage has increased, a large proportion use Nvidia. Overall, other causes of crashes have probably been fixed so what is left is the treadmill of GPU driver bugs that are fixed while new driver bugs appear.

Microsoft is prolly lying, since vista was designed so all drivers are certified and running in a protected way there is no way a driver can ever crash vista, MS is just talking along with naysayers and should try vista before criticising it.

/sarcasm

incidentally, when I tried vista it seemed to more lock up than crash, at which point it could not send an error report either I imagine (if people allow such)
So here's an idea for nvidia and such, write a crashdetection that locks up errorreporting in case of a crash, fixed.

http://www.jonpeddie.com/about/press/2008/q2-2008-gpu-shipments.php

here are some numbers.


Percentages are fine but i think you're analysing the statistics wrong. 

You should be looking at the percentage of Nvidia graphics cards of the total that are crashing. vs the percentage of ATI graphics cards of the total running vista. This would give a more objective outlook. 

and saying 2% of the crashes are attributed to unknown graphics makers is good could also be attributed to their relative market share which would mean they are very very bad. 

If you look at it this way Intel can't be selling that many crappy graphics cards anymore (SHOORELY) which would make their statistic the worst.

Technically speaking this Article does not give any proper insight into the crashes, reasons or analyse data properly.

First of all, you take something WITH a grain of salt, not AS one.

Pedantry aside, if Steam survey results - over 1.7 million unique results at this time - are to be taken with a grain of salt, just how much truckloads will you need for voting polls (based on 2 or 5 thousand at best) ?

Be serious. The Steam Survey is the best snapshot we have available at this time of the Windows gaming environment (yeah, Steam only runs on Windows), so that makes it the best reference for 95% of the market.

You can not like it, but I daresay until you have more reliable numbers, don't knock it.

Charlie almost had a real article until the snide comment at the end.

Keep working at it, old boy. You'll become a real journalist one day.

Do not buy Nvidia products. Their defective chips will blow up anytime and you will suffer. AMD had the grace to own & recall the defective TLB Phenoms but Nvidia is still pushing defective graphic chips as if there is no tomorrow. I know some Nvidia fans, who have money no object, do not care, but for the rest us who have suffered due to Nvidia , make Jen-Hsun Huang recall his sh*t back and clean up the channel.

ATIs marke share is about 30 to 35 percent.
One has to count all GPUs and not only dx10 GPUs to be honest.

When a crash due to NVidia driver problem occur Windows sent the report to Microsoft.

When a crash due to crappy ATI driver occur, their VPU recovery utility jump in, and sent the report to... ATI.

Thats how ATI keep their tracks clean.


Really...? We're blaming NVidia for this? I'd like to see the graphics cards be run on two separate tests. One with Vista, one with XP. Hmm, maybe then we'll see who we should really blame.