NVIDIA drivers responsible for nearly 30% of Vista crashes in 2007

That huge bundle of emails and documents Microsoft produced as part of the Vista-capable lawsuit is full of fascinating information about how the company developed, planned, and launched Vista, but the latest juicy nugget to come out if it suggests that a lot of problems faced by the troubled operating system are actually NVIDIA’s fault — nearly 30% of logged Vista crashes were due to NVIDIA driver problems, according to Microsoft data included in the bundle. That’s some 479,326 hung systems, if you’re keeping score at home, and it’s in first place by a large margin — Microsoft clocks in at number two at 17.9 percent, and ATI is fourth with 9.3 percent. Now, the chart doesn’t contain a ton of additional information that would help put it in context — a specific time period in 2007 would be nice, as would and driver and OS versions — but we’ve been hearing about NVIDIA issues with Vista from the start, and this seems to confirm it. So that’s pressure by Intel to support incompatible chipsets, outrage by Dell and Wal-Mart that the Vista Capable program was confusing customers, Microsoft executives saying they had been “personally burnt” by Vista, and now what looks like a huge NVIDIA driver problem — who knows what else is going to come out of this lawsuit? At this point we’re half expecting a photo of Gates signing a Save XP petition.

Source: engadget