NVIDIA has received a lot of criticism lately because of its lack of functional Windows Vista drivers and even NVIDIA feels that things has to be drastically improved. In an interview with PC Perspective, Dwight Diercks, VP of software at NVIDIA, has cleared the air about the manufacturer’s view on the matter and also reveal some of its future plans for its driver development team. A lot of the problem with the driver development has been how the new operating system handles the SLI technology. With Windows XP, NVIDIA had to develop two driver components, one for DirectX and one for OpenGL. With Vista they have now developed 6 different components to support everything from DirectX10 to SLI.
“Finally, the complexity of these drivers is simply astounding. Diercks claimed that each of the six drivers that NVIDIA has to develop for Windows Vista is roughly 20 million lines of code long; about as much code as Windows NT 4!”
It’s simply hard to develop a driver for Windows Vista when you have to start from scratch, which is pretty obvious as also AMD has some deficiencies with its drivers. But the perhaps most interesting is that NVIDIA seems to be adapting AMD’s concept of a new driver each month. When ATI was receiving the most criticism because of its drivers, it created the Catalyst program and started doing monthly updates, something that has proven to be a success. More information about NVIDIA’s development of Vista drivers and its future plans can be found at PC Perspective.
