Bob On Development

I’ve come to the conclusion that the weakest link in Vista is the video driver system. My wife’s new Vista Ultimate installation on a brand-new box has been the source of so much trouble I scarcely know where to begin. But I know most of the cause: video drivers.

The box, as configured by the vendor, was stable for about a month. During that time, we were busy with other things and about all we did was configure an Internet connection and install a half-dozen apps (after hunting down Vista-compatible releases or updates). Other than that we let the machine run 24/7 to burn it in, and that’s about it.

One fine morning, for no reason in particular, we started getting a series of balloons on the taskbar informing us that the video driver had timed out and had recovered. Perhaps 6 or 8 of these notices would arrive, one every few minutes. Then we’d get a Blue Screen of Death, with one of four stop codes, including good old C5, which is sort of the universal Windows “I’ve fallen and can’t get up” stop code.

This tended to be worse when the machine has been on for a long time, or when something stressful was running (an Unreal Tournament 2004 game demo that the system came with could cause a video driver reset every 5 seconds like clockwork, for instance). But, these errors and crashes were perfectly capable of happening with the machine just sitting unattended at the desktop with no apps loaded.

My wife has an nVidia 8800 video card, the latest and greatest and supposedly the ideal card for Vista Aero — and DirectX 10 capable, or will be when they iron out the kinks. It’s overkill right now, but we tend to have long hardware cycles in our household and we thought that this card should be able to handle anything we might throw at it for the next four years. Given the fact that it had all worked fine for a month, it seemed obvious to me that we had a hardware problem.

So after we did the obligatory fiddling with video driver and BIOS updates, memory and hard drive tests that the hardware support tech walked us through, they relented and sent us a new 8800. Noting with satisfaction that this new card was BIOS revision 24 rather than 02, I installed it, only to find that … THINGS WERE EVEN WORSE. Now the errors cropped up more frequently, basically all the time.

Still, if you uninstalled the nVidia drivers and used Vista’s generic Super VGA driver, it would work fine.

Hmm.

By this time nVidia’s fora were full of people complaining about video driver resets. nVidia even posted an apology and vowed to fix this problem in a future driver release. One fellow mentioned he was using a recent beta driver and that it fixes all his problems, so we tried installing that. Now, we only get a video reset about once or twice a week, and no BSODs yet (knock on wood). But as a token of our boundless confidence in this Vista installation, we run with the case cover off and leave the machine turned off at night, to keep it running as cool as possible.

Our hardware vendor also offered us an ATI card to replace the nVidia card, but we refused it for two reasons: the ATI card is significantly less card for the money, and a quick Google search for field problems with that card reveal that ATI users are having their share of Vista-specific driver issues as well.

In fact, all the nVidia driver reset issues were Vista-specific. How about downgrading to a 7950 or other card? No guarantee of success — these problems are happening across the nVidia product line — under Vista, but not XP.

As a business application developer, I don’t consider myself knowledgeable about driver-level programming. But it doesn’t take an expert to see that something in Vista is giving major video chip makers fits. This interview with an nVidia VP of engineering confirms that. In addition, it makes the startling assertion that nVidia’s drivers for Vista comprise twenty million lines of code. That’s twenty million lines for each of six versions they maintain for Vista. If that is even one-tenth true, it’s incredible. Of course this is a guy who is begging his customers to show him mercy, so he doesn’t say how many lines of code are in XP drivers for the same cards, or how much of that is embedded data or generated code, etc.

However, we can safely assume that nVidia has been working on Vista drivers about as long as Vista has been under development, which is to say, “forever”. We can safely assume that quality-assured Vista drivers available on Vista’s release date were mission-critical for them. So if they are struggling this hard, this late, I conclude that something about Vista’s driver requirements are misguided or broken.