DirectX 10 (In)Compatible Hardware Brought a World of Pain on Vista Users

Windows Vista was launched for businesses in November 2006 and to the general consumers in January 2007. It took Microsoft well over a year to produce the first service pack for the operating system, thus delivering a comprehensive sign that the platform has reached a level of maturity that recommends it even to the hardcore Windows XP users. And in this regard, SP1 could mean the end of Microsoft sabotaging its own Windows Vista. This because, although it went all the way up to the 100 million sold licenses milestone, Vista was plagued with problems throughout 2007. And two of the biggest sources of driver-related crashes for Vista are graphic card makers, Nvidia and ATI.

"Vista has been very, very popular in the consumer world. I'm not saying that there aren't things that customers choose to comment on," Microsoft Chief Executive Officer stated at MIX08, in early March. But internal Microsoft emails made public via the Windows Vista Capable lawsuit, courtesy of SeattlePI, reveal the true dimensions of the problems that end users faced with Vista RTM.

"Come on, the number one issue we've had customers have issues on were application compatibility and driver compatibility. We made a very concrete set of choices in order to enhance the security, Vista is a very secure system. We've had very little issue of that kind. It's the most secure client operating system out there. But we did have it we did make the choice to kind of hurt compatibility and our customers have let us know that that has been very painful," Ballmer said.

Leading in terms of faulty drivers is Nvidia, having generated in excess of 479,000 crashes, namely 28.8% of all the drivers issues reported to Microsoft. But next it is the Redmond company itself, after it has caused over 290,000 crashes with its drivers, making up a percentage of 17.9%. The source of more than 280,000 crashes has remained unidentified, but in forth place is ATI with approximately 150,000 problems, and then Intel with 146,000. It seems that Vista and DirectX 10 have brought nothing but a world of pain in terms of drivers for end users. Hopefully, Vista SP1 and DirectX 10.1 will not repeat the RTM experience.

"A couple of things have happened, a lot of the apps have now been upgraded to be compatible, and the drivers have been upgraded. We've shipped our first service pack, Service Pack 1, which allows us to factor in a lot of the quality and other suggestions that people have made, and I think we're starting to see more uptake now in the business market, and Vista continues to sell quite strongly in the consumer market," Ballmer added at the beginning of March, and before Vista SP1 was available to the general public.

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