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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 ?
> 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.
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.
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.
I see your point. But most people don't want to put whatever and have it work. Most people don't even know what a graphic card is.
It's the vendors that want to be everywhere to make more money. But they can't provide the quality with the increasing complexity.
That's why Apple's setups are often considered good quality. They solved the problem by limiting the hardware and software combinations.
I dislike Apple but I can at least see that their strategy worked.
The problem I got with this is that proprietary software has the same order of magnitude of problems that free software has. But I paid for the first one, and people writing it are paid.
I can accept bugs in FOSS because of it's very nature. But if you can't give me a guaranty that my product will work, what did I pay for ?
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.
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 :)