Vista SP1 and ATI - Dangerous Vista News Discuss Vista SP1 and ATI - Dangerous in the Windows Vista forums; Vista SP1 (Beta) and ATi Drivers: Not a Great Mix If you do gaming on Vista, and use an ATI video card, you probably won't want to try the ...

[Snuffy]

Vista SP1 (Beta) and ATi Drivers: Not a Great Mix
If you do gaming on Vista, and use an ATI video card, you probably won't want to try the recently leaked SP1 pre-beta.

Vista SP1 (Beta) and ATi Drivers: Not a Great Mix
Published August 15th, 2007 in Software, Windows
Tags: ATi, Drivers, Graphics Card, Microsoft, nVidia, Vista, Vista SP1, Windows

Continuing our line of Vista SP1 stories, we’ve been testing the leaked version of Windows Vista SP1 and have some interesting results with regards to the WDDM layer.

Since Vista RTM, one of the biggest sources of consternation and BSODs on Windows has been the graphics drivers. From ATi to nVidia, hardware manufacturers were very late in the game, not producing final drivers until January and February (3-4 months after the official release); and even then, their quality was definitely sub-par with what we’d come to expect with Windows Vista.

Perhaps we’re being unduly harsh here - after all, Windows NT driver developers had had over a decade of testing and real-world experience with the NT graphics driver subsystem, and here they were, required to learn anew everything from writing the drivers to getting them to work with Vista’s new (and stringent) driver protocols and more. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that driver-development teams at both nVidia and ATi just weren’t up to scratch.

Since then, bug reports have diminished as the list of issues and incompatibilities slowly were slowly vanquished, one by one - with nVidia undeniably in the lead. nVidia’s lead in driver reliability has grown even further with SP1: the same ATi drivers that were working just fine under RTM with the same hardware (and running the same games) are now BSODing under Windows Vista SP1.

Obviously no one is to blame here - not yet, anyway. Windows Vista SP1 isn’t even in beta yet (though it certainly isn’t alpha!), and ATi’s drivers weren’t intended for use with anything other than Vista RTM and its immediate updates. It’s quite simple, actually: if you’re a gamer using ATi and interested in checking out SP1, think twice before you act. And remember, forewarned is forearmed.

http://neosmart.net/blog/2007/vista-...t-a-great-mix/

[felix8406]

I'm using a Radeon X550 PCIe and so far it has worked just find. The article really doesn't provide any facts, or at least an example of what they are warning people about. Since the release of Vista final edition, ATI has released many driver updates, including one update just released this week.

[Snuffy]

now BSODing under Windows Vista SP1.

is all that is mentioned and GAMES but not what games.
worse thing I have found is Vista never has any mention of the error codes any where for me, they always come back as NOT FOUND. I still send the dang things...

[felix8406]

That’s why I take articles as such with a grain of salt. The author doesn’t even mention whether or not he tested an ATI graphics card or experienced those issues himself. It’s all hearsay. The sad thing is that many people take comments like that as fact, without validating the source.

[Snuffy]

http://www.theregister.com/2007/08/10/ati_driver_snafu/

An unpatched flaw in drivers from ATI creates a means to smuggle malware past improved security defences in the latest version of Windows and into the Vista kernel.

Microsoft is working with ATI on an update which security watchers warn might be far from straightforward to roll-out.

The existence of the security flaw in ATI's driver came to light after developer Alex Ionescu released a proof-of-concept tool called Purple Pill that created an easy way to load and unload unsigned (potentially malicious) drivers on Vista. The utility circumvented new anti-rootkit defences built into Vista by turning off checks for signed drivers.

Ionescu pulled the utility hours after its release after realising that the ATI driver flaw Purple Pill uses, which he learned about in a presentation by Vista kernel security expert Joanna Rutkowska at Black Hat last week, is yet to be patched.

The functionality of Purple Pill is similar to Atsiv, a tool designed by Australian developer Linchpin Labs, as part of a research project into driver signing. Microsoft responded to the creation of Atsiv by revoking its certificate and classifying the utility as malware, much to Linchpin Labs' chagrin. Atsiv had evolved into a project that allowed users of legacy hardware to use their kit on Vista without signed drivers

seems several more similar programs are emerging via the hack/warez sites.