Main Area and Open Discussion > General Software Discussion
Cause of Vista crashes
Carol Haynes:
Maybe they should follow Apple's lead and use their own hardware.
-Rover (March 28, 2008, 02:50 PM)
--- End quote ---
Don't Apple use nVidia and ATi cards? Until recently they used nVidia 7300 and now they use ATi Radeo 2600HD XT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600.
See http://www.apple.com/macpro/technology/graphics.html
It is interesting to see that Apple consistently stay at least one generation behind cutting edge graphics (however they present their graphics capability). Given that most high end cards are really aimed at gamers I suppose it makes no sense for Apple to be at the bleeding edge since they don't really do games.
Lashiec:
Well, that chart is only numbers, and there are quite a few variables at play to explain those percentages, most of them are pinpointed in the Ars' article linked at DownloadSquad.
It's well known, though, that nVidia had a rough time updating the ForceWare package of drivers to work with Vista and, at the same time, to properly support its new 8xxx generation of graphic cards (DX 10), which were released more or less at the same time than the new Windows. ATI didn't had those problems, as the current generation at the time was the Radeon 1xxx (DX 9), which already had its share of development by then, and the newer 2xxx parts (DX 10) were released in May of 2007. Maybe ATI adapted itself to Vista better than nVidia (in general, Catalyst got better under the umbrella of AMD than before), but this is something to be considered as well. Essentially, they got lost in the translation :)
Don't Apple use nVidia and ATi cards? Until recently they used nVidia 7300 and now they use ATi Radeo 2600HD XT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600.
-Carol Haynes (March 28, 2008, 07:33 PM)
--- End quote ---
Well, OS X uses OpenGL, and those cards are compliant with the latest spec, so there's no much hurry to use the latest and greatest card. Besides, I think the most graphic-hungry game available for the Mac is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which although a demanding game, it's not Crysis by any stretch. Still, the GeForce 8800 GTS is available at the Apple shop.
Deozaan:
allen: drivers have to be signed, generally... especially for x64 systems.
-f0dder (March 28, 2008, 07:00 PM)
--- End quote ---
Yeah, I think that's his complaint. He's saying that laptop drivers have to be issued by the laptop manufacturers, so they have to be re-signed, which means he has to run old drivers until his laptop manufacturer gets around to updating their version of the driver.
I would have expected ATI to be worse than nvidia, though.
-f0dder (March 28, 2008, 07:00 PM)
--- End quote ---
I was thinking the same thing. ATI's drivers have had quite a poor reputation the past few years. Strange to see nVidia acting up so badly. Although, when I think of when I had Vista on my PC, the default ATI drivers that were installed using Windows Update crashed my system a couple times.
MrCrispy:
Device driver development at ATI and Nvidia are probably near the top of the most inept, mismanaged and plain old lousy software divisions in the entire IT industry. Microsoft makes driver specs available nearly 2 years in advance for Windows versions, as well as providing numerous certification mechanisms (such as WHQL) and giving guidance and support to the driver devs. Instead of doing their job, they instead are busy implementing crappy bloated control panels, cheats for graphic benchmarks and hacking things up. The avg user sees blue screens and does 2 things -
1- blame the OS
2 - upgrade to fancier (newer) gfx cards
Also, since 32-bit versions don't require signed drivers, everyone is used to simply clicking 'Continue' as they install the latest beta driver to try and fix their system. And sometimes the official drivers are unsigned as well. Oh and lest I forget, Creative also belongs in this illustrious club :mad:
I had dinner today with one of the head device driver engineers from Nvidia and the tales of mismanagement would make your blood curdle. I can't divulge details but lets just say the no. of active bugs in their video drivers for Vista is north of 500k. ATI is #2 largely because of lower marketshare, not for lack of trying. But of the 2, ATI is the lesser evil.
As you can tell I'm a little bitter about the whole state of affairs.
Carol Haynes:
Don't Apple use nVidia and ATi cards? Until recently they used nVidia 7300 and now they use ATi Radeo 2600HD XT or NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600.
-Carol Haynes (March 28, 2008, 07:33 PM)
--- End quote ---
Well, OS X uses OpenGL, and those cards are compliant with the latest spec, so there's no much hurry to use the latest and greatest card. Besides, I think the most graphic-hungry game available for the Mac is Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, which although a demanding game, it's not Crysis by any stretch. Still, the GeForce 8800 GTS is available at the Apple shop.
-Lashiec (March 28, 2008, 08:43 PM)
--- End quote ---
Out of curiosity do NVIDIA and ATI provide the drivers on Mac systems or are they written by Apple or a third party?
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page
Go to full version