NVIDIA Most Responsible for Early Vista Crashes

According to some fresh Microsoft reports, we can now see what caused most of the reported crashes after the consumer launch of Vista last January. Intel and ATI both claimed 9% of the responsibility each, according to Microsoft, while they themselves were responsible for 17.9%. The biggest share belongs to NVIDIA, whose driver failures were responsible for a staggering 28.8%.

This doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me, because as I was working on our gaming performance reports pre-launch, I experienced an incident where an NVIDIA driver caused Vista to completely crash, which proved unrecoverable. As we discovered in that same article, performance was also lacking, so there was a definite problem.

Luckily, that’s been all sorted out, though it did take a few months. It was a time when ATI actually had quite an advantage with reasonably stable drivers, but as it stands now, both companies have very stable drivers under the OS (even though ATI’s takes three times as long to install).

As part of the ongoing Vista Capable class action lawsuit, Microsoft released data on exactly what drivers caused the bulk of logged Windows Vista crashes. The number one culprit of Vista crashes related to driver failure was NVIDIA at 28.8%. Microsoft only broke logged crashes out for a few companies including NVIDIA, Intel (8.8%) and ATI (9.3%). Microsoft’s data shows that it was responsible for 17.9% of logged crashes.

Source: DailyTech