nVidia - why Vista support has sucked!

[Melbosa]

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=357

This scares me:

After hearing our complaints, NVIDIA let us speak with Dwight Diercks, the man ultimately responsible for all the software engineering that goes on at NVIDIA.  Diercks was willing to sit down and talk with me about NVIDIA?s Vista drivers, their preparation for the Vista launch and what we can expect going forward from NVIDIA?s driver team.

First though, Diercks explained some of the difficulties that NVIDIA was having on their Vista driver development.  While reiterating over and over that these are not NVIDIA?s excuses for running behind on their driver development, there is little doubt that most users will see them as just that until NVIDIA gets their software up to the levels expected of them.

One difference between developing SLI for Windows XP was drastically different than it was for Windows Vista is that the NVIDIA hardware and driver could basically work together to make SLI function without letting the OS know what was going on.  This put the entire software stack in NVIDIA?s hand, making it easier to find patches and loop holes to get SLI performance to scale well.  Vista?s dramatically changed graphics driver model will no longer turn a blind eye though, and because of it, the amount of driver development time has increased.

For Windows XP, NVIDIA simply needed to create two main driver components; really two separate drivers.  One for DirectX rendering and one for OpenGL rendering.  With Vista though, things have changed, and NVIDIA now needs to develop six separate drivers.  One for DX9 single card, one for DX9 SLI, one for DX10 single card, one for DX10 SLI, one for OpenGL single card and one for OpenGL SLI modes.

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[Tom]

Wow, I wonder if many of the hardware manufacturers are screaming about Vista? I can see that costing and arm and a leg to develop

[Lazybones]

I haven't seen ATI complaining....

[Cova]

nVidia marketing BS.  How much code do you think is shared between those 6 "drivers" that they claim to have to develop now.  For that matter, nVidia has always had to support multiple potential configurations, which they've always done with one driver before - the same download would be fine for virtually any nVidia-based card, on most MS OS's - that being a single binary that detects what the user has and just runs that part.  Brandt's quotes on it didn't contain the other bit of info I've also heard them claiming - that each of those 6 "drivers" requires 20 million lines of code (that being more than was in all of NT4).

Years ago when I ran a hardware site I dealt with nVidia's PR department directly - and I can see they still haven't changed at all.  Lie to the consumers, bribe the hardware sites, do whatever it takes to push your @%&#.