How the hell do they will work? What do they do? Why do I need to update them for certain games or applications to work? I like to think I know a decent amount about personal computers but I have no idea. There was a game on my computer that wouldn’t play when I opened it and the game would crash every time. I updated my drivers and it ran with no issue. The game never had any updates and I never changed any parts of my computer why did the game randomly stop working with no changes? Why does updating drivers work to fix it and what do they do?
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Gonna answer the portion about why you need to update them cause others covered the other ones
We’re able to have two different products developed simultaneously that fit together because we have established standards that each meet. One of those is the graphics API like DirectX or Vulkan.
Those libraries need to be updated for security reasons among other things, and in order to keep working, those drivers need to update their own code in order to keep working properly.
Certain features may need to be removed because they’re a vulnerability on the operating system side and as a result, the driver needs to find a different way to do that same task. This happens a LOT as new vulnerabilities are discovered every day. You see these all the time in tech news.
Basically the graphics card (or any hardware device) and operating system both need to write to meet a mutual standard. The side of the hardware that does that is called the driver. The side of the OS is called the API, the application programming interface, which is a way to access the operating systems resources with a standard calling convention.
The way we do this for USB devices is similar, it uses a serial bus interface standard that enumerates the ways data should be sent back and forth to work properly. That standard base standard is called the Serial Peripheral Interface standard.
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