What Is a Video Driver, And How To Install It?

Everything about graphics and video drivers of desktop and laptop computers

Graphics cards and drivers are slightly different animals.

For day-to-day use, our computer does not need to present us with heavy visuals - even all its graphics in a video or movie file are pre-recorded and the computer only Need to display information in the file.

Onboard HD graphics processor in your motherboard can handle it properly.

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


At a 1080p resolution a screen set is more than two million pixels (1920 x 1080 = 2,073,600) and while displaying real-time scenes, each of these should be fully lit to show the image to you. A CPU, designed to handle data processing, cannot handle it.

So, enter the GPU;

The graphics processing unit, which comes in the form of a large module which is known by names like graphics cards and video cards, is specially designed for such a thing.

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

It creates an invaluable requirement for GPUs to run applications such as video games, video editing/rendering, CGI / VFX designing, and like all pieces of hardware, this little beauty requires a driver.

The GPU works on a similar principle of CPU, in fact, it is a CPU, which is optimized for working with specific applications and software that are demanding on a highly CPU. The second processor takes responsibility for creating images and takes some load.

The driver applies the interface to the card which enables the interaction between the operating system, the CPU and the card, all of which work together to run specific programs on specific efficiency.

As discussed earlier, a faulty driver will create problems, and unlike the network card driver, these cannot be immediately apparent. The GPUs can continue to run with the bad drivers, but if there is a bad chance there can be only a few distractions when some serious glitch is thrown in your graphics.

Always make sure your drivers are updated properly. For the most popular use of today's graphics card, it doubles - video games

GPU makers update their drivers regularly to improve their compatibility with the latest game, and sticking to the old driver will be unavailable on many of the latest performance boosts.

Unlike network card drivers, a faulty GPU driver does not affect your internet connection so it can be easily updated, restored, or replaced.
Just open your device manager and find your graphics card. Fetch details and you should see the drivers tab;

From here you can select the update driver to update it automatically, or (if you want to be a bit darker), you can go to the manufacturer's website and select the driver, download it. And install it

Drivers that support display for specific games can be installed this way to get the most out of your graphics card.

While talking about graphics card drivers, we can not leave the API.

The API application stands for programming interface, and it is not specific to GPU drivers, but it is more important here in case of sound cards or network drivers, which are far more simpler in operation and hardware complexity.

APIs are essentially pre-written subroutines for communication between software components - which makes it easy to work with them. In high-performance graphics applications such as video games, this will reduce the processing time, which translates into a better performance output.

The most popular API for Windows, of course, is DirectX;

Some applications rely on more APIs, which make DirectX's job easier, such as Direct 3D and OpenGL.

See how the complex things got?

And the driver is the glue that keeps it all together, and if the glue is not enough ... well, you can imagine.

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

The recently released DirectX 12, for example, has been celebrated for a 70% boost for graphics cards, which are relevant to it.

New API Vulkan developed by Khronos Group is also more barley-dropping. That sentence and those names give them sound like evil sci-fi corporation, an evil genius sci-fi corporation. The Vulkan, which is to replace OpenGL (also developed by Khronos Group), successfully shares CPUs and GPUs with their workload in a manner that can give normal performance up to 2x 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 this game will only support Vulkan and not DirectX 12.

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

So, yes, API matters. The negativity is that the application should be written with a compatibility for the API (or later patched), and those who do not, will affect your ability to run the application in the first place.

Not all is lost, though: Multiple APIs can be installed on your computer so that the game can choose the person that works best for it and uses it to help present the graphics.

The APIs are also backward - so you can actually run the old DirectX 9 games on your DirectX 11 graphics card.

So yes, we have some discounts for our needs.

Keep the long story short, your driver and your API up to date to get the best results from your graphics card.

How to install it:

First of all, there is one thing that I wanted to clear earlier and that is, a video driver does not mean that it is a file that you can easily download and install it on your computer.

And I'm just saying this because to download a video driver, first of all, you have to find the compatible drivers according to the hardware on your site;

Therefore, if you have a graphics card installed on your computer that you use for better graphics output, then you will need to download and install drivers for that particular graphics card;

Or if your computer does not have any graphics card installed and you only use video output through the motherboard's video port, like we already have in our computer system, you will need to download drivers Install the video port of your motherboard and make it work for it.

Or suppose, if you have a laptop in which the video card has been preinstalled, or it may only have a dedicated graphics chip;

Or maybe whatever you have;

Just stick with this guide and I will definitely help you with this messy driver thing.