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[JimH]

Vista crashes

Microsoft's data strongly indicates that the problems were real. According to documentation on page 47 of the PDF, NVIDIA drivers were the cause of over 479,000 crashes, or just under 29 percent of all the crashes Microsoft logged. Microsoft's own drivers follow, at 17.9 percent, and the "Unknown" category takes third place at 17 percent. ATI is in fourth place (9.3 percent) and Intel in fifth place (8.83 percent).

From Arstechnica article on lawsuit discovery materials (via Engadget):
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080325-vista-capable-lawsuit-paints-picture-of-buggy-nvidia-drivers.html

[newsposter]

...and I'm really liking the minimal CPU loading that the new HD3xxx ATi card/driver combo uses for HD playback and transcoding.

nV still does the 'best' OGL work (but not by much), important for professional apps and some very high-end simulation/game engines.  But for everything else, DX10, HD video work, ATi is the current king of the mountain.  I also find it easier to do vidcard/monitor/scanner/printer profiling with ATi products than nV.

Tomorrow is another day though.  nV has at least two new GPUs coming out in the next three months; we'll see if ATi can keep up with improvements to Catalyst and continue to wring more performance and overclocking from the HD3xxx chips.

[xen-uno]

Embedded in Jim's link ...

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080224-judge-greenlights-vista-capable-lawsuit-but-limits-scope.html

... ouch! .. but I have absolutely no sympathy

Nvidia drivers (8800GT here) work great under Ubuntu (Linux) and under XP x64 ... flawlessly in fact. Not sure where ATI stands but I've heard some negatives. Ubuntu's Compiz Fusion uses OpenGL (as does Gnome interface) and should break weak drivers (they're not). It's pretty neat as you can turn Vsynch on for the entire interface. No tearing when window dragging and if your playing a DVD, the video stays locked into the frame (distorts and bends too when rubber windows is turned on). I'm not much into eye candy if it decreases window element display speed but there seems to be no impact whether Compiz is on or off.

[Stargazer]

I don't know about other people, but all three of my current systems have nVidia based video cards.. and my last three video card upgrades have been nVidia based cards, and they have all been very reliable.  As a computer tech I see a lot of 'video related' issues, but it ussually comes down to the appication was designed/based on 'current' drivers, and users tend to leave drives as they are and they get old and out of date very quickly.   

Apps crash video drives, Vista logs it as a video hardware crash, when it really was a application crash.... If they did more research, and looked at what apps crashed the video, they would get a better idea of the issue.   And then how many of those crashes were with current (at the time of the crash) drivers? Probablibly not many.   

[JimH]

Apps crash video drives ....

Could you explain what you mean?  I don't see how an application that isn't talking directly to a driver can crash it.