After painstakingly installing printer drivers for a thermal printer at work I realized I still don’t truly understand what I was installing. (Bonus points if you can cover video card drivers too cause idk what drivers are In that sense either)
In: 2515
Every machine or component you connect to you computer (be it internally or externally) has its own set of functions. For example, your printer might have functions like “advance the paper by X units” or “move the thermal head to position X” or “turn on heat for X seconds”.
Hardware functions are typically quite low-level, while the things you want to achieve are usually more high-level. For example, you don’t want to tell your printer manually to move its head or to turn on the heat. You want to put in a file that it then prints correctly.
A driver is a program that translates between the low-level communication protocol the hardware uses and the higher-level communication you would like to use.
Regarding video card drivers: When rendering stuff, you generally need a lot of mathematical operations, like matrix multiplication for example. That is what a video card does at the low level. But at the higher level, you want to tell it things like “draw me a triangle between points X, Y, and Z” or “fill my polygon with this texture” or “translate this 3d object” — the logical stuff you need to render 3d scenes.
Latest Answers