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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Drivers are the “middle man” between your operating system/software and hardware (your GPU in this case, you could and you do have drivers for other devices as well).
Every hardware device has it’s own “language” (instruction sets) and the driver is what translates the instructions your game sends out so that the GPU can understand them and do what the game asks it to do, since we’re talking GPU’s in this case it would be drawing things on screen.
Why updating drivers fixes issues: because drivers are not always perfect and they get improved over time. Additionally GPU manufacturers (specifically NVIDIA/AMD/Intel etc.) work closely with game developers and if a game developer needs something that is currently not possible without a slow workaround the GPU manufacturer might add it to the driver so that it isn’t a workaround anymore and done at the lowest possible level and that’s why drivers get releases made specifically for new games which might fix crashes and other rendering issues.
Why your game randomly stopped working I can’t say, technically it should not but it’s possible a windows update broke something or windows decided to downgrade your GPU driver during an update (has happened to me in the past).
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