[AlwaysRock]

I cant prove this but my computer blue screened after a Nvidia driver update. It took my several hours to get everything working again because it wouldnt even launch in safe mode. Very frustrating. I wish they had a little more quality control on their drivers.

[drbawb]

I ran into this a while back, there was a BSOD in the GTX 980Ti drivers that only got triggered by multi-monitor setups. Hilariously the solution was to use a newer beta driver that hadn't passed WHQL yet. (Rolling back would've worked as well, but I was updating specifically because there was a bug in the previous driver. WebMs in Chrome would start out mostly black w/ fuzzy blocks and after a loop of the content they'd work fine.)

They make cards w/ 4x DisplayPort connectors, but apparently multiple monitors isn't part of their quality assurance process? That seems a mite silly to me.

[hermitdev]

I've 4x GTX 690s 3x dedicated to GFX, 1 to physics. 3 to VFX. I'm seen a number of GSODs with bugcheck VIDEO_MEMORY_MANAGEMENT_INTERAL. Always happens when I've 1 monitor streaming news, primary monitor playing Civ VI.

[diamondlovesyou]

Interesting. I have an AMD card and experience that too.

[hatsunearu]

Oh trust me, they do tons of QA. If you can replicate what problem you have demonstrably with steps that QA can follow and you submit to the Nvforums or whatever, someone in the QA team will eventually try it out.

[jcadam]

I once interviewed for a Software Engineering role with an Nvidia QA team in Austin 5 or 6 years ago(would have been working on maintaining the test software that validated new drivers on huge banks of test hardware, if memory serves).

Wasn't too terribly impressed with the team (and a couple of them were definitely giving off that "I hate my job/life" vibe, one disgruntled fellow was even trying to drop little thinly-veiled "run away!" hints at me). I figure either the cream of the crop at Nvidia doesn't work in QA, or they don't get proper support from upper management.

P.S. Didn't get an offer anyway, probably for the best - I was desperate for work at the time and would have taken it :)

[oridecon]

After the "Tom" incident I'm not surprised to hear about anything that happens inside NVIDIA. That presentation, months of bad drivers (yes, I was using DDU) and the GFExperience login thing made me switch to another brand.

[influx]

I didn't know what the "Tom" incident was, but assume it is this, which is deplorable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGrvahez1H8&feature=youtu.be

[chrisper]

There is one with better sound

https://youtu.be/iAueZ_VWBUU

[realharo]

I dunno, I have had to live with this bug (https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/953432/geforce-mobi... , https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10... ) for over half a year now.

[__jal]

Yeah, Nvidia rather sucks at cleaning up after themselves, for whatever reason.

The main reason I'm not buying another card from them is their stance towards Linux in general and their stance towards PCI virtualization in particular.

I'm currently not upgrading drivers due to the latter; they're trying to disable the capabilities (dedicating a card to a VM) that are the reason I bought a second card in the first place.

I can usually deal with either lazy or greedy, but both in conjunction is infuriating. Screw those guys.

[bonzini]

If you're talking about GPU pass-through, they're just trying to make it hard, but they're not making it impossible.

If you're talking about virtual GPUs, where one card is split across multiple VMs, however, unfortunately that's Tesla only. That said, I worked (as the maintainer of KVM) with the nVidia driver people working on vGPU, and I was very impressed. They were very knowledgeable and professional, and they managed to contribute a generic Linux framework for virtualizing PCI devices rather than a one-off hack specific to nVidia. Intel is using the same framework now, in fact.

[__jal]

I know it is not currently impossible, but I don't trust that the current "policy" will continue.

Personally, not talking about virtual GPUs. (I mean, that's cool stuff, but that's not my use case.) I'm glad you found the driver engineers to be solid. I doubt, however, the engineers are driving the decisions on what passthrough functionality Nvidia feels like allowing consumers to have this week.

Or driving decisions like this: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/579449/linux/basemo...

I personally consider removing functionality after I purchase something to be a form of fraud. And Nvidia doesn't seem very shy about doing it. Thus, I don't trust them, and don't do business with untrustworthy vendors.

[yuhong]

I think they want to limit it to Quadros to be more precise.

[bonzini]

Yes, exactly. But they don't try _that_ hard.

[kpozin]

I had to revert the Windows 10 Anniversary Update to work around that.

[hermitdev]

why?

[kpozin]

The crash-on-full-screen-video bug started on my laptop after installing the Anniversary Update (v. 1607). I have a hybrid Intel 4000 / NVIDIA NVS 5400M video card, similar to the setups described in realharo's links. There was no driver fix available (and apparently there still isn't), so I had to revert to Windows 10 v. 1511 to work around the bug.

[cr0sh]

Yeah - that sounds like fun - recreating a driver install issue after you finally have it working on your system. Heck, even if you set up a system -just- to recreate this problem, it would still be one of those "nightmare inducing" trials of will. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, I just can't imagine doing it (especially on my personal workstation).

[sametmax]

Plus you paid for the computer, graphic card and OS. Why in hell would you spend hours of work on your free time for this ? Do people try to find defects in their car then send a report to Ferrari ?

[JorgeGT]

> Do people try to find defects in their car then send a report to Ferrari ?

Yes.

-- Ferruccio Lamborghini.

[strictnein]

The problem is not with the car but with the driver!

-- Enzo Ferrari

[Closed. Will not fix.]

[ksk]

> Why in hell would you spend hours of work on your free time for this ?

Sure, you can either return the items, or report the bug, or hope that you've managed to find a workaround.

There's no need to discourage people who want to spend their own time on getting the bug fixed so that others benefit. Not everybody thinks the same way you do.

[sametmax]

Oh I report bugs all the time. For open source projects. When I pay hundreds of euros for a product I expect it to work. Strangely it something we don't expect for anything related to computing.

We have such double standard.

If you buy a washing machine and it doesn't work, the brand sucks.

If you buy a graphic card that makes you OS crash, it's just nvidia needs a little help. Replace nvidia with any gadget or software.

Windows uses to crash all the time, and people found that normal. The same problem with a microwave would have issued a massive recall but microsoft got away with it.

Well, no sorry. You just sold me a non working product, wasting my money, my time, and preventing me from doing the task I was going to do with my computer.

I'm a dev, I understand perfectly WHY it happens. Complexity VS expectations VS cost. I get it. But the consumer is cheated here.

[brokenmachine]

I know what you're saying, and I do agree, but as you know, not all problems will be Nvidia's fault.

I guess it depends on how obscure/serious the bug is, but the reason we can't have everything working always is because people want to be able to put whatever random hardware and software of their choice together and have it all work. It's not that simple.

There's a lot of stuff that has to go right for things to not have problems. PCs have become insanely complicated and there's almost unlimited chances for a particular combination of hardware/software to have bugs out there.

If you paid (a lot) more for a certified system, then maybe you could expect it to work flawlessly. Are there vendors that do that? I guess it would have to be for only a particular software setup as well.

[ksk]

I understand your view, I just don't see why others should also adopt it.

[digler999]

that's the Next Big Thing in software engineering. lay off your QA department and shovel the burden on the users, who work for less than minimum wage. Actually, they pay you to find your bugs.

[hatsunearu]

I mean, if you do this, you're expediting the process, not "doing their work for them".

[sleepychu]

You're being down voted but I had the exact same behavior last week, in the end I gave up trying to fix it and reinstalled Windows to a new drive, at some point I'll wipe my old 'C' and move my new 'C' back to the fastest boot drive.

[sherincall]

That is pretty weird. Safemode boot should still work if the installation was botched.

You can try to remove all the NV kernelmode driver files manually, at which point it should just fallback on the default VGA driver. Then you can use the DDU[1] tool to cleanup any remaining files, and do a clean install with a driver from nvidia.com.

Do you perhaps remember what the bugcheck code was, and which driver was listed as the offender? If you have a kernel minidump still available, that'd be helpful as well.

[1]: http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstall...

[rdudek]

Have you tried using Display Driver Uninstaller ? This is something I do every time I update the driver. Run the program, tell it to start in safe mode, run the program again, tell it to uninstall the driver. Reboot. Install new driver package, run DDU again to re-enable automatic driver install (because you need it for other devices) and done. Works like a champ and always fixes any odd driver behaviors.

Link to DDU: http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstall...

[EpicEng]

So, yeah, that sucks for sure and I'm with you, but imagine you're a driver dev and every mistake you make can now potentially blue screen the OS. Life in user land is very different.

[Raphmedia]

I often have the issue with their "clean install" option where it uninstall the current driver, reboot, fail to boot because there are no drivers and don't install the current version. Very frustrating.