#2 - #3 - agree...
Ya poor NVidia, they had to write the drivers from scratch ya know and had no idea what Microsoft would change.
Ok, they did have to write them from scratch, but had specifications in hand over 3 years before Vista shipped, and even though they were keen to market the 7xxx series as Vista ready, they never even dropped beta drivers to people until late in the beta process.
Let's see, new drivers from scratch, new ways things are handled, new OS level multi-tasking and RAM GPU virtualization, and applications will need entirely new optimizations for virtually every game that currently has XP based optimizations in driver code.
- So ya, 4 months of testing should have been plenty. Major driver revisions take longer with more testing. (Why were they this stupid?) Maybe they wanted Vista to look sad?
They could have used the beta users and all that time to profile, re-engineer the drivers, learn how to optimize the drivers for a multi-tasking GPU OS like Vista, how to optimize games being played based on the new features of the WDDM that can and should speed up even older games (as Oblivion optimizations have shown a 20% boost on Vista with good drivers over XP performance).
It is sad that microsoft didn't kick both ATI and Nvidia in the ding ding for having suck drivers at Vista's release, when both companies had more than enough time.
Oh, and for the claimed 'Changing specs' that NVidia talks about, they were the ones that whined to MS to get them to be more forgiving on the specs for WDDM 1.0, making it easier for NVidia cards without the unified shader architectures.
However, it is nice to see some consistency of drivers from ATI and NVidia for a while now (although the ATI AGP screwup of late last year was just stupid).
People now can demonstrate Vista outperforming XP not only in single GPU/Application settings, but show off some of the WDDM features, like using higher quality textures than their VRAM is capable of with no FPS loss, or multi-tasking 3D applications with little to no FPS loss, while running them on the Aero desktop via the shared texture composer that only Vista has, which keeps non-full screen 3D applications running full speed along side Aero and other 3D applications at the same time.
PS We won't even see the benefits or speed of DirectX10 until they make a game from scratch designed around the DX10 architecture. All these DX9 games with DX10 ports for higher pixel textures and some 'effects' just don't cut it. When we finally see a game on the store shelves that say DX10 ONLY, will people see how much better DX10 can be in terms of performance and providing a richer game experience. (Look at the DX10 engine demos over the past couple of years, if the engine is fully DX10, the game is faster and looks 20x better than the same game built on a DX9 engine.)
Ok, off my rant, just one of them mornings I think. :)
This post was edited by anthonyspt on Wednesday, April 30, 2008 at 04:59.
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