Have You Hugged Your Driver Writer Lately?

In my contact with users, on X-Plane forums, in discussions of computer graphics, video drivers are an easy punching bad. When an app doesn't work, blame the video driver. The guys at NV and ATI don't have time to respond to every ridiculous allegation that is posted. Sometimes drivers are borked, but when it turns out to be X-Plane I try to set the record straight.

Driver writers have what might be the hardest combination of programming circumstances:

1. Their code cannot crash or barf. X-Plane crashes, you send me some hate email. Your video driver crashes, you can't see to send me that email.
2. The driver has to be fast . The whole point of buyng that new GeForce 600000 GTX TurboPower with HyperCache was faster framerates. If the driver isn't absolutely optimized for speed, that hardware can't do its thing.
3. The driver writers don't have a lot of time to be fast and correct - the GeForce 700000 GTX TurboPower II will HyperCache Pro will be out 18 months from now, and they'll have to start all over again.

That's not an easy set of goals to meet. Today's video cards are basically computers on a PCIe board, and they do amazing things, but they do it thanks to a fairly complex piece of software.

Applications writers like myself get to outsource the lower level aspects of our rendering engine to driver writers. When a driver doesn't work right, it's frustrating, but when a driver does work right, it's doing some amazing things.