Mass Effect and Nvidia
After hearing soooo many good things about Mass Effect, I decided to bite the bullet and purchase it (via Steam, of course) this weekend. This game is massive, it took me upwards of 24 hours for Steam to finish downloading it. It doesn’t help that Steam likes to flake out mid-download, but that’s a different story. Anyway, after all that time downloading I finally get in to play it only to find that it crashes… ALL… THE… TIME. I couldn’t play the game for more than 45 minutes without it hard locking. I found this to be very frustrating.
Anyway, after a few Google searches I find people recommending downgrading Nvidia drivers to the 175 release. Apparently most people only experience these crashes with drivers 176 and above. So I pop on over to Nvidia’s site, grab the old drivers, install them, reboot twice and sacrifice a chicken to the dark lords of Microsoft. Okay so I made that last step up, but you get the idea. Bingo, I’ve had one crash since and I’ve put in a ton of time on the game.
Now then… for the point of this article. I don’t know whose fault this is considering that neither Nvidia or the makers of Mass Effect seem to want to acknowledge that there is a problem, much less fix it, nor do I really care. Both Bioware and Nvidia have been a massive disappointment lately in this department. Both companies have been releasing buggy software that never should of made it through quality control but somehow did. I mean, c’mon Bioware… people have dubbed your company Buggaware… what is it going to take to convince you that no matter how cool your games are, if they crash all the time people aren’t going to want to buy them?
As for Nvidia, just because you’re the dominant graphics card manufacturer doesn’t mean you can slack off on your drivers. I just hooked my computer up to my TV, expecting to use the video overlay that I love so much, just to find out it’s been stripped out of your drivers and/or my card. That kind of thing is completely unacceptable. If you don’t shape up, my next upgrade will be ATI. To be honest, the only reason I’ve given you so many chances is because of your superior Linux support. That’s not even going to be enough to save you though if you keep putting out drivers that strip out features and crash games.
I’m ashamed of both of you Bioware and Nvidia. This is the kind of crap that I’ve come to expect from Microsoft. That is NOT a compliment either. If I could ditch Windows completely, I would in a heartbeat, sadly I enjoy playing video games and WINE just isn’t quite there yet. The two of you don’t have that kind of grip on me though. I don’t have to buy your graphics cards or your games.
