how the hell do graphics card drivers work?

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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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Anonymous 0 Comments

Drivers are sort of a translator that allows different parts of hardware to work together. A PC manufacturer would have no control over what graphics card is installed and a graphics card manufacturer would not know what kind of PC it will be installed in. Generally, the graphics card manufacturers write a driver that understands a certain number of instructions and that can be somewhat standardized. So the software writers (like game developers) need to pass the right instructions and the driver translates that to the graphics card.

Over time, these instructions might get more sophisticated and updated as graphics cards get better. The software developers use the new instructions to talk to the graphics card but if the driver isn’t updated, it won’t recognize them and the software fails to work. The graphics card manufacturers update drivers so that it can (hopefully) understand the new instructions while still working with an older model graphics card. This is why drivers need to be updated – it is to synchronize the language spoken by all the different parties that develop things for the PC.

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