All About Desktop and Laptop Computer’s Graphics Or Video Driver

Graphics cards and drivers are a slightly different animal.

For day-to-day usage, our computer doesn’t need to present us with performance heavy visuals – even a video or a movie file has all of its graphics pre-recorded and the computer only needs to display the information in the file.

The onboard HD graphics processor in your motherboard can handle this just fine.

But when it comes to the real-time rendering graphics, however, this is a different matter;




A screen set to 1080p resolution has more than two million pixels (1920 X 1080 = 2,073,600) and when displaying real-time visuals, each and every single one of these has to be lit perfectly for the image to appear before you. A CPU, which is built to handle data processing, can’t handle this.

So, enter the GPU;

The Graphics Processing Unit, which comes as part of a bigger module which is together known by names such as Graphics Card and Video Card, is designed specifically for this kind of thing.

It can take real-time data, convert it into images, and present it to the user;

This makes GPUs an invaluable requirement for running applications such as video games, video editing/rendering, CGI/VFX designing, etc. And, like all pieces of hardware, this little beauty requires a driver.

The GPU works on the same basic principle as a CPU, in fact, it is a CPU, customized to work with specific applications and software which are highly demanding on the CPU. The second processor takes some of the load off by shouldering the responsibility of creating the images.




The driver for the card implements the interface that enables the interaction between the Operating System, the CPU and the card, all of which work together to run the specific program at maximum efficiency.

As discussed before, a faulty driver will cause problems, and unlike a network card driver, these may not be immediately apparent. GPUs with bad drivers can continue running, but the malfunction may only be discovered a way down the line when some serious glitch gets thrown into your graphics.

Always make sure your drivers are updated properly. This goes double for the most popular use of today’s graphics cards – video games.

GPU manufacturers routinely update their drivers to improve their compatibility with the latest games, and by sticking with an outdated driver you’d be missing out on a lot of the newest performance boosts.

Also unlike a network card driver, a faulty GPU driver doesn’t affect your internet connection, so it can be easily updated, reinstalled or replaced.

Just open up your Device manager and find your graphics card. Bring up the details and you should see the Driver tab;

From here you can select Update Driver to update it automatically, or (if you want to be a bit more thorough) you can visit the manufacturer’s website and pick, download and install the driver yourself.

Drivers supporting performance for specific games can be installed and switched out this way to get the most out of your graphics card.

When talking about graphics card drivers, we can’t leave out the API.

API stands for Application Programming Interface, and while this is not exclusive to GPU drivers, it is more important here than in the case of a sound card or network drivers, which are far simpler in operation and hardware complexity.

APIs are essentially pre-written subroutines for communication between software components – which makes it easier for them to work together. In a high-performance graphics application like a video game, this will reduce processing time, which translates into a better performance output.

The most well-known API for Windows, of course, is DirectX;

Some applications also routinely rely on more APIs that make DirectX’s job easier, such as Direct3D and OpenGL.

See how complicated things got?

And the driver is the glue that holds all this together, and if that glue isn’t good enough…well, you can imagine.

Properly updated and installed, all these will work together like a charm.

The recently released DirectX 12, for example, has been observed to give a 70% boost for graphics cards that are compatible with it.

Even more jaw-dropping is Vulkan, the new API developed by The Khronos Group. That sentence and those names make them sound like an evil sci-fi corporation, which they are – an evil genius sci-fi corporation. Vulkan, which is meant to replace OpenGL (also developed by the Khronos Group) successfully makes the CPU and the GPU share their workload in a manner that can give up to 2X the usual performance for the game.

Vulkan was so effective that Allistair Brown, Director of Graphics programming for the highly-anticipated Cloud Imperium Games’ upcoming release Star Citizen, announced that the game would only support Vulkan and not DirectX 12.

A bold move, and one well-received by the millions of contributors to the game (Star Citizen is, as of this writing, the world’s biggest crowd-funded project in history).

So, yes, APIs matter. The downside is that the application itself needs to be written with (or patched later on for) compatibility for the API in mind, and those that don’t do this will affect your ability to run the application at all in the first place.

All isn’t lost, though: you can have multiple APIs installed on your computer so that the game can pick out the one it works best with and use it to help render the graphics.

APIs are also backward compatible – hence why you can run really old DirectX 9 games on your DirectX 11 graphics card.

So yes, we have some leeway for our needs.

Long story short, to get the best work out of your graphics card, keep your driver and your APIs up-to-date.

#So, Now Let’s See How To Install It:

First of all, there is one thing which I wanted to clear at first and that is, a video driver doesn’t mean that it’s a single file which you’ll easily download and install it on your computer.

And I’m only saying this because to download the Video driver, first, you’ll need to find the compatible driver according to the hardware what you have on your site;

So, if you have a Graphics Card installed in your computer which you use for the better Graphics Output, then you’ll need to download and install the drivers for that particular Graphics Card;

Or in case, if you don’t have any graphic card installed in your computer and you only use the Video output through the motherboard’s Video Port, like what we already have in our Computer system, then you’ll need to download the drivers for your motherboard’s Video Port and install it to make it work.

Or suppose, if you have a laptop who having a video card preinstalled in it, or maybe it just only has the dedicated graphics chip;

Or maybe whatever you have;

Just stick with this guide and I’ll definitely help you out with this messy drivers thing.

#Now Let’s See The Procedure:

First, download the latest drivers from the internet.

And To do that;

Searching your Graphics Card’s Model No. /Motherboard’s Model No (If assembled computer)/Laptop’s Model No. /Desktop Model No. on the Google by adding the keyword drivers at the end on the Google and then open the manufacture’s website to find the drivers.

Then explore the site and find the compatible Vidoe drivers for your computer, and there is one more thing, you can’t install 32-bit drivers in the 64-bit OS even the version of OS is same.

At last, just download the compatible drivers and install it by following the on-screen instructions;

In case, just like most of the non-computer friendly people;

If you still having some problem to finding the compatible drivers or maybe having some issue related to installing the drivers;

Then you can also try to follow the instructions given in this link which can help you out to know >> How To Automatically Install And Update The Computer Drivers?



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