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?
In: 28
Device drivers are basically translation software that lets the operating system talk to the hardware and tell it what to do. Because a given operating might be running on all kinds of different hardware setups, rather than having all the possible instructions as part of the operating system, they let the hardware manufacturers design and distribute their own sets of instructions.
With video games in particular the video card manufacturers have a big financial interest in having their cards be the best at running all the newest games. So they actually watch new game releases and will update their drivers to optimize functionality with specific games in mind when they come out. They might also periodically figure out more efficient or more effective ways of translating software instructions to hardware actions. Instead of waiting for a new generation of cards to be released to release this new functionality, they’ll package that in to driver updates and let game developers use those features immediately. This is good for developers because they can use the newest features without worrying about backwards compatibility, and good for video card manufacturers because it extends the functional lifetime of their cards.
That’s almost certainly what happened in your case – you had a pretty old driver installed that didn’t include some set of instructions or specific functionality that the developers of that new game had made use of. In effect your graphics card was rendered incompatible with this new software. But, it’s fine, because the video card manufacturer put those new features in a driver update.
Latest Answers