We’re just one day away from the consumer launch of Microsoft Windows Vista, and most mainstream hardware manufacturers don’t yet have final drivers for the operating system. I’m talking to you, Creative, nVidia and ATi. I don’t care how much you have to change your driver structure for Vista; it still stinks for consumers who go to install the operating system only to find their hardware is half-supported.

Right now, I’m experiencing a lot of joy with my ATi Radeon X1900 Pro video card and my Creative X-Fi XtremeMusic sound card in this respect. My ATi card seems to be okay in Direct3d, but runs quite slower than it did under XP, which I hope is just temporary, considering I dropped more than $500 for this video card. OpenGL doesn’t work at all under these beta drivers, so any games that use it (think Doom3, Quake, Far Cry, etc.) are a no-go right now.

Don’t even get me started about the beta Creative sound card drivers; they constantly “glitch up”, sending nasty noise through my speakers while I’m playing music. And sometimes they’ll forget they’re in 5.1 surround mode, and suddenly start playing the music out of just the rear channels. Huh?! And did I mention all EAX acceleration in games is going away? A feature that Creative has touted for years as giving them an advantage is now moot under Vista’s driver architecture, and Creative loves to whine about it. Supposedly they’re working on a wrapper to automagically wrap EAX calls to the newer OpenAL logic.. but I’ve yet to see anything work like that.

And in the end, Microsoft will be blamed for these driver problems, because no one wants to educate the public about the value in keeping your drivers up to date for all components of your system. The concept isn’t even in most people’s heads. And it probably shouldn’t be. It should “just work(tm)”, you know? Vista has advanced driver support under Windows Update, which looks promising at keeping everyone’s machine up to date with the latest drivers. And you have companies like Dell with support programs that run in your tray to check vendor-specific updates — Dell’s will even tell you when a BIOS update is available. That’s cool, but what about people without a Dell? etc…

Anyway. That’s my rant of the morning. Here’s hoping the Vista launch tomorrow comes with a minimum of problems. Are you planning on upgrading? Do your friends or businesses?

I did a fresh install when the final was released months ago, and I love it. I don’t miss XP in the slightest. I think after goofing with it for a day or so, you’ll feel the same.