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
The driver is simply the proprietary code that enables, unlocks or powers on all the extended features of the device. Windows over the years has absorbed quite a few low level drivers for various chipsets – the sound chips on motherboards for example. Few of us bother getting a dedicated sound card anymore unless we’re doing some hardcore MIDI or sound engineering work and we need more than an aux in/out channel. Turns out that a lot of these sound chips that get stuck on motherboards are made by just a handful of companies. Realtek example. Those guys don’t make full boards, their bread and butter is just making sound and ethernet chips that companies like MSI or ASUS use on their motherboards.
ANyways, Microsoft has absorbed the drivers for a lot of these more commonly used chipsets and you’ll probably get some pretty ok performance of that device out of the box (or out of the Windows box). But to really turn it on you need the chip vendor’s driver. For example, WIndows supports almost every nVidia and ATI/AMD graphics chip known to man with some bog standard VGA drivers – that’s what Windows uses when it first installs. And it’ll do pretty good. But to turn on all the advanced whizbang features of your GPU, you want the driver from nVidia or AMD – that will unlock all the CUDA cores, the PHysX simulation, the advanced ultra mip-mapping three terabyte tesselation RTX realtime lighting whatever.
For more esoteric devices that Windows _wont_ have a driver for out of the box, you NEED the vendor driver. Lets say for an advanced data acquisition card – all USB or PCIe devices will physically respond to your computer asking “hey, what devices are out there?”, then “hey DAC card, what device thing are you?” and your device will respond with some common information. For a USB device this will be a unique vendor ID and a device ID – then Windows UPdate uses that to go off and find the driver from the Windows Qualified Drivers database; otherwise it will sit there in Device Manager as a big yellow question mark. Windows can detect it, but it doesn’t know how to make it work.
Same thing with printers – Windows will have some standard printer drivers that will be able to spit basic print jobs to most printers. But to do advance things like scanning, faxing, printing in colour with CYMK colour balance (I dunno what else is important for a thermal printer), you gotta have the vendor driver – because the device specific commands for _that_ printer will be different from other models of even the same vendor.
A completely weird analogy I just thought up. You’re in a foreign land. Lets say they speak German. You speak English – there’s some words in common, and through a _very_ limited vocabulary and some gesturing and pointing you can communicate. But to have a meaningful conversation with all the nuance and details, you both gotta be speaking the same language. A device driver is the operating system to hardware translator.
Latest Answers