Talking About ATi Vista Drivers

[HardOCP News]

With Windows Vista driver support being such a hot topic lately, it seems that very few companies are getting it right the first time. PCPerspective takes a look at ATi’s Windows Vista driver support as well as current and upcoming features.

ATI discussed the sheer size of the Vista driver development project. In all, ATI estimates that 200 man years or more was required to get their Vista drivers up to the level of performance and stability that was expected of them by both users and executives. It was by far the largest software project ever taken on by the ATI software team simply because everything was rewritten from the ground up.

 

[Burning_Monk]

A linux CCC, interesting. Seems like some good things planned for the future. Looking forward to the XP release of 7.2

 

[Ockie]

Looks like ATI actually put down some investment and drive into thier drivers.


Nvidia on the other hand... well I dont' want to get into it but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a 80 year olds first time writing a driver.

 

[43n1m4]

As I have been saying for some time, ATI has the superior driverteam.
Nvidia has a harder job, though, with their DX10 capable G80 lineup, but still -
at the end of the day we all look at the results. And Nvidia has a lot to prove...

I'm still waiting for my 8800GTS to work properly in XP 64-bit.

 

[idividebyzero]

Nvidia doesnt have a harder job because theres still the non dx10 cards they cant manage to get right. My 6800 is a complete mess in Vista, all the 100.x drivers dont run a single game Ive thrown at them, they always freeze at the loading screen. Im stuck running the 97.46 drivers which provide terrible framerates in very old games that should have no problem running totally smooth, any game newer than Splinter Cell1 is totally out of the question.

The Nvidia team just sucks horribly compared to the ATI team. I hope there are a LOT of firings at Nvidia headquarters after this.

 

[Lazybones]

Planning? Exra Teams? Delivering on Time?

What sort of crazy company are they running.

 

[emory]

If they really did use 200 man hours, and we assume the average employee makes 50k a year * 200 man years, there went 10 million dollars on a driver package. That works out to 25000 $400 buck video cards. Pretty crazy when you think about it.

 

[Wumpus]

Actually, I would think that driver team must have some sort of R600 silicon, and has had emulation for plenty long. Still, you have to wonder how far they have come along on DX10, and how much left to go.

The [H]ard part comes with HCDP. Once they include that, they get to fire up all the snooping circuitry to make sure you don't just snag the picture with a multi-channel oscilloscope or something. Encrypting, decrypting the software *without killing performance* might not be that hard, but the incessant spying on the user might slow things down a bit.

Wumpus

 

[Ockie]

If they really did use 200 man hours, and we assume the average employee makes 50k a year * 200 man years, there went 10 million dollars on a driver package. That works out to 25000 $400 buck video cards. Pretty crazy when you think about it.

Looks expensive, but they probably sell a million+ cards.

Well if you looked at thier revenue, they pull in 2.22 Billion dollars....

 

[Martyr]

Actually, I would think that driver team must have some sort of R600 silicon, and has had emulation for plenty long. Still, you have to wonder how far they have come along on DX10, and how much left to go.

The [H]ard part comes with HCDP. Once they include that, they get to fire up all the snooping circuitry to make sure you don't just snag the picture with a multi-channel oscilloscope or something. Encrypting, decrypting the software *without killing performance* might not be that hard, but the incessant spying on the user might slow things down a bit.

Wumpus

not like it matters at all. we can pull the data right off the disk soon, no need to display it through hdcp