Vista – Developing Drivers Debacle.

Those that follow this blog and the goings on in the graphics card market know that to date we have not seen drivers for Vista that allow full performance from graphics cards for gaming. This although Microsoft has said repeatedly that Vista has a very strong focus on Gaming on the PC. This does not just apply to graphics cards though, as Creative seem to be struggling to bring out a fully functional driver for their sound cards as well. The drivers for the X-Fi, their leading sound card and supposedly the number one choice for the discerning gamer, has several features still missing (Remember folks, we are less than two weeks away from the official consumer launch of Vista!).

We spoke to NVIDIA to understand why there isn’t a 8800 Vista driver currently and why we won’t see one until Vista’s launch. NVIDIA’s GPU drivers these days are made up of approximately 20 million lines of code, which as a reference point is about the size of Windows NT 4.0. Because G70 and G80 are radically different architectures, they each require a separate driver. Combine that with the fact that Windows Vista has completely changed the driver interface, similar in magnitude to what happened between Windows 3.1 and 95, and you’ve got a “perfect storm” of conditions for driver development. The end result is that for Windows Vista, two 20M line drivers have to be completely re-written (one for G80 and one from all previous architectures). In other words, this isn’t a simple port, it’s a radical departure from the way things were written before.There are other elements of Vista driver development that apparently require more work than before. DirectX 9, DX9 SLI, DX10 and DX10 SLI support is provided through four separate binaries, which increases the complexity of testing and the overall driver itself, whereas there was only a single driver in the past.Interfaces for HD-DVD and Blu-ray video acceleration requires a lot more code than before, thanks to the support for a protected path for HD video under Vista. Supporting this protected path for HD content decode means that you can’t re-use the video part of your driver when developing a Vista version.The last major difference between Windows XP and Vista driver development is that the display engine connecting monitors to the GPUs has been completely redone.
Initial investment in driver development under Vista takes up quite a bit of time, and now we understand a little more of why. While it would be nice to have one today, there’s always a tradeoff that has to be made especially when driver work this intense has to be done. Couple that with the recent launch of NVIDIA’s G80 GPU and the decision was made to focus on DX9 and XP drivers in order to make the G80’s launch as solid as possible, and commit to delivering an 8800 driver by Vista’s launch.
When the driver is eventually available NVIDIA expects performance to be at par, slightly slower or slightly faster than the XP driver. What we’ve seen thus far from other Vista drivers is that performance is slower almost entirely across the board. As stability is currently the primary goal for both ATI and NVIDIA, many compiler optimizations and performance tweaks aren’t being used in order to get a good driver out in time for Vista’s launch.

So, allow us to translate that passage taken from anandtech. Nvidia is having trouble delivering a full featured driver that works on Vista for gaming. The driver for their flagship Direct X 10 product seems to still be in alpha stage, and apparently that driver isn’t even worth leaking to the enthusiast market for ‘unofficial testing’. Previously we covered a story which pointed to the requirements for viewing Protected High Definition video which necessitated completely altering the approach to unified driver development which has benefitted both the developers and consumers for so long. Some individuals thought that was an exaggerated view of the situation, but here we have Nvidia themselves mentioning the Protected data path as a setback for them with regard to delivering working drivers. Certainly the DRM requirements of Vista are causing developers problems. Bear in mind that these are not some small,obscure third party companies. These are the Big Gaming Three – Nvidia, ATI, and Creative. Far less for the smaller players in the market being able to deliver on this new Vista platform in a timely manner.Nvidia will most probably deliver some form of driver support in time for Vista’s launch, but at this rate it is not going to be fully tested and optimised. They said themselves that they are being forced to leave out several optimisations and performance tweaks just to deliver a stable product. So for gamers hoping to install and run Vista Ultimate this is certainly a disappointment.This will also explain why all the DX 10 titles which were expected at launch have been delayed.

The consumer is certainly reaping what Microsoft has sown with regard to Protected DRM paths in the OS and it’s heavy insistence on Digital Rights Management in the Vista Operating System. No doubt future multimedia expansion cards such as graphics and sound cards are going to be more expensive as companies must now cover not only the new hardware, but also the higher development costs for drivers. What is the benefit of this to the consumer? Supposedly a more stable computing environment protected from Operating System crashes because of misbehaving drivers. But one has to wonder that if the need for Digital Rights Management was removed, whether Microsoft could not still have provided stability and security without completely upsetting the status quo and forcing an increase in development costs and ultimately the cost to consumers.

In other news, the HD-DVD DRM has been cracked, allowing consumers to copy and burn backups of HD DVD movies.

What was the point of all this?