The most stable driver on the planet

[stancil]

The most stable driver on the planet comes from AMD. Richard Huddy, AMD?s Game Developer Relations Manager, has done a video interview with a german IT site which can be found here.

On 03:50 beginns the talk about the reliability of amd drivers compared to their competitios. Dont?t worry, the complete interview is in english. I don?t know what the current driver situation on windows is, but he definately doesn?t speak about fglrx

Ejoy!

[BlackStar]

I can't be bothered to watch yet another video interview (text transcripts ftw), but AMD's graphics drivers used to be (and probably still are) more stable than Nvidia's on Windows.

(Linux is another matter entirely, although I haven't had any stability issues in quite a while).

[Zhick]

IIRC Microsoft once said that something like 60% of windows-crashes were due to the nvidia-driver. If that is true (I wouldn't bet my money on that though :P), then that'd obviously mean that ATi's windows driver are in fact much more stable.
In my experience they are indeed pretty much ok (yes, I dual-boot, about once in a month :P), way ahead of their linux-pendants at least.
Edit: Ok, I googled that up, it's actually only 30%: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/03...vidia-drivers/. ATi is responsible for 9.3% according to that chart, and Intel for 8.8. Given that most GPUs supposedly are Intel IGPs that'd mean that Intel's is the most stable driver for windows.

[BlackStar]

Edit: Ok, I googled that up, it's actually only 30%: http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/03...vidia-drivers/. ATi is responsible for 9.3% according to that chart, and Intel for 8.8. Given that most GPUs supposedly are Intel IGPs that'd mean that Intel's is the most stable driver for windows.

I don't think that's a safe conclusion, actually, simply because Intel IGPs tend to have different usage patterns than AMD/Nvidia chips. Intel IGPs are widespread in the consumer market, but it is the business market they dominate (all those shitty little office machines used for Word, Excel and the like - they sport Intels). In that sector, you won't find 3d graphics, games or anything that places demands on the drivers, so crashes are bound to be less common.

Intel drivers are not all that stable though. I've used pretty much every Intel IGP since the 865 and *every single one* has caused blue screens in 3d applications (I'm not kidding, move away from the 2d/GDI and the cards *will* crash sooner or later. WPF apps, World of Goo, Google Earth - I've seen crashes with all of those. Things *are* getting better, though.)

In an interesting twist of fate, I've found Linux Intel drivers to be much more stable than their Windows counterparts.

[droidhacker]

You ever try developing a driver for windoze?
Not fun.

[L33F3R]

i doubt a video driver will ever be the most "stable" driver, ever. there are plenty of hardware drivers that fuck up alot less.

[BlackStar]

i doubt a video driver will ever be the most "stable" driver, ever. there are plenty of hardware drivers that fuck up alot less.

Considering that the GPU is the single most complex peripheral, that's not very surprising. I recall Bridgman quoting that fglrx/catalyst has more than 10M lines of code, which puts some things into perspective.

Then again, the worst drivers I've ever seen are for expresscard esata to sata converters (2 different makes, both causing the system to crash and burn randomly), followed by Creative's audio drivers (the ones that caused Microsoft to remove hardware acceleration from DirectSound), followed by the mess that's printer drivers (seriously, HP, 250MB for a printer driver isn't a bit excessive?)

However, GPU drivers are those that cause the most spectacular failures - and since every system has a GPU, they tend to be the most visible failures, too.