I thought I had said it did not include any major fixes, not that it didn't include any fixes. There is a difference. We have been running several stress systems and the TDR bugs we caught were fixed. Major fixes are those meant to address a specific type of TDR that either several users logs were reporting or that we were able to reproduce on more than one system. The next driver release will contain one last major fix in addition to any other bugs our QA team may find during normal driver testing process.
As for explanation, I'm not exactly sure specifically what type of answer you are looking for. Beginning with R280.19 drivers, we made significant back end changes in our power management system that provided improved performance and lowered power usage for graphics cards that could dynamically adjust clock speeds. When I started working for NVIDIA, our display driver was slightly under 3MB in size. Now it is about 160MB. Our GPUs are performing a lot of work which is all managed by our software and this whole process is very complex. The changes to our power management regrettably introduced new bugs in our drivers. At first we believed the issue was possibly limited to a single bug which was an error on our part and resulted in us not able to provide any meaningful fixes in our R285.27 driver release. After we started working with end users more directly, it was obvious that this issue was not limited to a single bug and so we undertook the task to find all of the bugs we could with the help of our end users and fix them as soon as we reproduce them. Gradually with each new driver release we have been introducing more fixes to address this issue and we are at the point where we believe we are for the most part finished. We do apologize that to all of you who have had to wait a long time for a fix and the inconvenience this has caused. New processes have been setup in our QA test process to catch desktop TDR/internet browsing bugs going forward.
