The documentation details that Nvidia drivers caused 479,000 crashes out of a total of 1,663,748 logged by Microsoft across an unspecified period in 2007. Microsoft's own drivers followed at roughly 18%. Rival video card manufacturer ATI clocked in at fourth with 9.3%, and Intel at fifth with 8.8%.

The information was found within 158 pages of internal emails made public as part of an ongoing lawsuit against Microsoft for their hand in alleged artificial inflation of computer prices during the 2006 holiday season.

Numerous reports of users experiencing difficulties with Nvidia drivers on Vista had surfaced at the time of its debut, leading many to label the operating system as a buggy or unstable system. The revealed statistics represent the first publicly available hard data on the root cause of Windows Vista instability.

Microsoft recently released Vista Service Pack 1, which reportedly boosts gaming performance on the platform.

Technology site ExtremeTech is showing up to a 46 frame-per-second increase in Crysis low-quality performance after applying the patch, with similarly large 20 FPS gains recorded in World in Conflict.

The advantage of Service Pack 1 was of a smaller magnitude under high quality settings, with only modest 2-5 FPS boosts recorded on average. The performance increase has also shown to be inconsistent across varying games--some benefiting little by the patch--as well as when comparing systems with Nvidia and ATI video cards.

Many gamers have been reluctant to upgrade from Microsoft's Windows XP to Windows Vista due to the latter's widely-known disadvantage in gaming performance. However, comparisons between XP and Vista performance are now neck-and-neck, with Vista actually winning out in a few instances, according to Neowin.

While today's patch seems to generally benefit users running under reasonable settings and hardware, those with beefy quad-SLI video cards may actually see a performance decrease, as bit-tech.net documents.

Service Pack 1 also adds support for DirectX 10.1, which offers shader model 4.1 support and greater control over anti-aliasing options for those users with supported video cards.

The pack can be auto-downloaded through Windows Update, or found on Microsoft's site in 32-bit and 64-bit flavors.