The latest Nvidia ForceWare drivers are out, along with 10 full pages of known issues. The show-stopper for me is a bug that causes the display to remain black after resuming from sleep. I read about this one back in February and it still hasn’t been fixed, nearly six months later.
Over the weekend, I yanked the Nvidia cards from two different systems, and the result was like a breath of fresh air. My Vista Media Center machine is now using an ATI X1300 Pro and is running perfectly. On my second desktop system, which I use for testing software, I’ve reverted to the onboard Intel GMA950 graphics. Guess what? Sleep works now.
I’ve got more details in this piece I just published at ZDNet:
Ed Bott (@ wordpress.com) 
FWIW, I’m running an Nvidia chipset (ASUS N6200) with no troubles. There used to be a message on recovery from sleep mode about a driver failure in the video card (though it didn’t blank the screen), but that’s gone after the recent driver update.
Ed i am having the same issue with my Toshiba Qosmio G25-AV513,
It as an Nvidia GO 6600 card, it goes to sleep and can’t come out of a black screen.
it’s been like this ever since Microsoft included the GO 6600 drivers in vista.
Nvidia is going from bad to worst.
I can’t say that either of the companies have really stepped up to the plate in making good drivers for DX10….but since there’s no DX10 games out there (with the exception of a patched COH) we still have no solid ideas as to how the cards perform. From the bug-list fixes though, it seems that ATI is decidedly better for HTPCs, with their AVIVO tech really doing wonders, but I think Nvidia has the lead when it comes to gaming on DX10 (based on game demos that were shown). But both companies have been doing rather poorly with the current set of drivers. Hopefully the Gen2 DX10 HW will be better and come out with good driver support.
I think that Nvidia cards are mostly useful for gamers… non-gamers may as well stick with the onboard graphics.
BTW, Long’s got an interesting bug fix list for Vista which includes the hibernate bug Ed was talking about I think:
http://www.istartedsomething.com/20070730/vista-hotfix-performance/
Looks like it’s not just Nvidia’s problem here…
Geek, it’s not just gamers versus non-gamers. You need to add in two other categories of people who have to be picky about display adapters and can’t settle for onboard graphics:
Business users with multiple monitors. Most onboard graphics solutions support a single monitor, and don’t have the performance to handle multiple monitors.
Digital media enthusiasts. If you want to push HDTV out to anything but a small monitor, you better upgrade your video card.
Evilkat, that’s a different bug. The one I’m talking about is not related to Hibernate at all but to sleep. I expect to see some improvements with the sleep feature, but what Nvidia is suffering from is a driver that doesn’t wake back up when told to do so.
Ed, you’re right…my mistake 😛 I was looking through his blog when I remembered u had posted something similar…should have checked back 😛 Hopefully it does help with the problem if nothing else!
I’ve been very happy with the ATI card I chose as a replacement for my woefully underpowered NVIDIA. That’s my “long story short” version of the same kind of rant.
ATI has irritating problems too , but they fix them fastly.
Vista Home Premium installed late February using an ASUS P5b-E board and an Nvidia card showed same symptoms. Upgraded the driver in mid-April to Nvidia 7.15.11.5818 and sleep / hibernate problems disappeaared. All ia well.
HAHA! If I stopped using hardware due to issues like this I would not be able to build a computer. My God ATi has had one of the worst track records in the history of video card drivers. At least nVidia forced video card standardization with their unified drivers. Apparently you never went through the hell that was ATi before the catalyst drivers were released nor after. But hey I understand one issue on your machine is all it takes to stop using a brand. Like I said I would not be able to build a computer if I followed this logic.
Andrew you’re missing the point we are taking about the here and now, and as it stand Nvidia drivers are terrible.
ATI catalyst drivers have been kicking Nvida’s ass..
Terrible? Not even remotely. I have never had any serious problems with them. nVidia has always documented their driver issues. The fact that Ed points to nVidia documentation for his problem is proof of this.
Apparently you guys do not deal with end user support on a regular basis. You name the hardware and you can find an issue with it that effects somebody.
With issues like this I always contact the company before doing knee-jerk reactions of dropping a quality product that has had an incredible track record compared to ATi.
BTW these sort of issues are why people should not jump ship so early to a new OS. I always wait a year or so for my personal machines because I don’t enjoy being a Beta tester on RTM code. I see the issues with clients who dive in. This is par for the course. Add these up with all Hardware on Vista Pre-SP1 and it is simply better to wait.
Check out “Does your Computer Drive you Crazy?” here:
http://www.wxpnews.com/archives/wxpnews-288-20070731.htm
I guess it’s in the air!