NVIDIA makes up a manly slice of Vista Crash Pie

Now THAT is a delicious looking piece of pie. That’s the size of slice I like when everyone else at the table’s on a diet. “Yeah, you know what?,” I’ll say, “Gimme a huge piece, like a real man-piece. You went to all this trouble to bake this delicious pie and I’d love to eat almost 29 percent of it in one sitting if nobody else minds.”

Anyway, Ars Technica is reporting data from 158 pages of Microsoft e-mails, one of which contains the above figures. You’ll notice that NVIDIA accounts for about 29% of Vista crashes, while Microsoft and “Unknown” account for almost 35% combined. I’m inclined to propose that “Unknown” should be considered a Microsoft problem until someone can figure out what’s causing those crashes.

Ars also points out the following…

The data points in the table cover an unspecified period in 2007, and Microsoft makes no attempt to break the aggregate data down into which device drivers, specifically, returned the highest number of crashes. If the number of failures were split by month and then graphed, we’d presumably see the number of NVIDIA driver failures per month decreasing as the company slowly brought its driver issues under control.

…so take that into consideration.

Whatever the severity of NVIDIA’s involvement, I can personally vouch for some wonkiness here and there — mostly graphics settings being forgotten when the computer comes out of sleep or hibernation modes — involving NVIDIA cards on my Sony VAIO VGN-SZ650 notebook and an HP s3100n desktop, but I haven’t had any major meltdowns that can be attributed to the graphics drivers on either system.

Your thoughts? Anyone having graphics problems with Vista?