Nvidia to move to ONE driver update per year??

PreservedSwine · Oct 22, 2003

Anyone check this out?

The company hopes to release as few as one driver update per year--though on this point, a representative acknowledged that the GeForce FX line of cards has a known issue with full-scene anti-aliasing (especially in recent games like Halo for the PC), and that the company hopes to address this issue soon.

Interesting, I guess it has both good and bad...

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/news/news_6077157.html

Evnas · Oct 22, 2003

one driver release per YEAR?! That will put their worth right down the tubes. Any game that comes out after the release of the drivers would be worthless if there was a bug. I dont think any company would dare to even think of doing that.

*edit* And not only that, but they would have to develop a PERFECT driver which is impossible, period. Not even nVidia's head is up there *** that far as to think they can acomplish that (and if it is, they deserve the repercutions)

Falcon-K · Oct 22, 2003

yea i am highly doubting this as well...its just not smart business

JigPu · Oct 22, 2003

At least they didn't say the will ONLY release one per year... They at least have enought sense to know that doing so is probably impossible. While they say at least one per year, you can probably read it to safely mean "two or three per year at most".

It's good to allways try to make your drives as best as possible to reduce the number of driver updates you have to make, but I really doubt they'll be able to pull anything near that off without either a) the drivers sucking by the end of the year or b) releasing quite a few more than the two or three drivers they want to put out.

JigPu

Evnas · Oct 22, 2003

Even 2 or 3 per year would not only be terrible business sense, but also horrible customer support. There will never, ever be a bugless driver, and making your customers wait months to get that fix...that would nearly halt their sales. They would lose all credability in the enthusiest market, they would lose all partners in the OEM market. The only market they would have a chance in is the portable one (since its the OEM company who makes the drivers for those cards, not the video card company themselves), and even then, nVidia holds but a small bit of marketshare there. If nVidia (or any comapny) did such a think, they might as well publically announce "We give up"

sixshot666 · Oct 23, 2003

i say one driver a year would work if and only if they came out with patches for the driver just like game patches.patches
to fix bugs and update the driver.IMO this method would be alot easier than uninstall old drivers and install new drivers.

JigPu · Oct 23, 2003

Evnas said:
Even 2 or 3 per year would not only be terrible business sense, but also horrible customer support. There will never, ever be a bugless driver, and making your customers wait months to get that fix...that would nearly halt their sales.

That's what I was saying

Either nVidia can't see the problems with releasing a limited number of drivers per year (and thus end up with horible support), OR they'll end up making quite a few more drivers than they hoped to make in one year (so they keep their support, but "break" their hopes of yearly drivers)

I'm guessing/hoping option #2, but you really can never tell....
JigPu

PreservedSwine · Oct 23, 2003

I wouldn't mind one driver release per year, but as Evnas pointed out, it's just impossible.

It's pretty clear what this means.

nVidia is cutting funding for the driver team, and thus will not be able to continue releasing drivers as much as they used too.

This is just trying to put a positive spin on a financial set-back...

germanjulian · Oct 23, 2003

hey i remember nvidia saying a few months back they hope to release a new driver every month!

somebody is cutting back big time. with the next generation of ati and nvidia GPU's we will see if nvidia will go bust or not. they better create a much much better chip then the pice of silicon they have now

Evnas · Oct 23, 2003

I find this comment about the whole nVidia thing pretty funny, from HardOCP

The message is clear. One nDriver a year and ATI makes no impact. I think NVIDIA is the one smoking the hallucinogens this week. Who knew NVIDIA would be doing standup?

TUK101 · Oct 23, 2003

One driver per year would be pretty cool if it was a great driver and guarenteed stability with all games coming out in that year. Another problem with one driver per year is that they release on the average at least two new cards per year, which you would think would need a new driver to take advantage of the new features that the card packs. Idunno, it just sounds to me that Nvidia is just trying to cut its losses in the one place that it shouldnt. Nvidia still has a reputation for having the #1 driver out there, even though ATI has pretty much caught up to them in that department. I think that they should maintain the positive reputation that they already have and focus more on coming out with the next great chip rather than settling for 2nd best.

Falcon-K · Oct 23, 2003

TUK101 said:
One driver per year would be pretty cool if it was a great driver and guarenteed stability with all games coming out in that year.

problem with that is they cant get a driver to fully function sometimes with previous games let alone games that have not been released...and look at many of the new games that just came out all have problems of some sort due to drivers, halo cant use af/aa with nvidia drivers, jedi academy cant use aa/af with ati cards sometimes, its just not a feasable idea to future proof drivers

Evnas · Oct 23, 2003

Not to mention there are in-numberable numbers of system setups that they cant all possibly be tested on, and thus there will end up being conflicts with one thing or another. And you also have to think of all the other hardware that comes out...they would have to take into account that their stuff wont conflic with that stuff.

Nvidia to move to ONE driver update per year??

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