Posted by Jed Lewison on Sun Apr 22, 2007 at 9:58 PM Pacific

Nvidia's Vista Drivers Still Suck

Last week, I installed Nvidia's new 158.18 beta drivers for Windows Vista. The two biggest improvements are in WMV playback, which is now quite smooth (most of the time), and with the control panel, which is now far less buggy. I still have several problems, however.

• When I'm using Windows Media Center, video plays smoothly when there are no UI elements on the screen. But as soon as a UI element, like the time elapsed bar or the information bar, comes up, the video starts to stutter.
• I have an Nvidia 6600 graphics card with 256MB memory which works just fine under XP. But even with the new drives, video playback is choppy. When I use the onboard graphics on the 6150 chipset, playback is fine, but that requires using even more onboard memory. I'd like to use my perfectly serviceable 6600 card, which should yield better, not worse performance.
• The lack of scan/overscan is disastrous. The documentation claims that there is an 8% scan/overscan option available if you go into the display settings control panel. Either I'm dumb or this feature is actually unavailable, at least for my 6600 and 6150 graphics solutions.

All-in-all, I'm probably reinstalling XP on the box in question. That's saying quite a lot. I use XP on my core HTPC, but my plan for this satellite PC was to use Vista so I can get used to the new Media Center, which has a very different look and feel. But the functionality is so bad -- primarily because of Nvidia -- that I'm going to go back to XP for awhile.