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Drivers

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In computing, a device driver or software driver is a computer program allowing higher-level computer programs to interact with a hardware device.[1]

Graphic (Display) Drivers

It is generally a good idea to stay relatively up to date with video drivers, newer revisions will often include fixes and performance increases depending on the title and hardware. Beta versions are also sometimes available for those who like to live on the bleeding edge at the potential cost of issues.

nVidia Drivers

Visit nVidia drivers page and fill in the form.

AMD / ATI Drivers

Visit ATI Drivers support page and fill in the form.

Custom Drivers/Experimental Beta Drivers

Use with extreme care, make sure you know what you are doing

  1. Omega Drivers(Mainly ATI/AMD Custom Drivers)
  2. Laptop Video 2 Go(Mainly nVidia Experimental Beta Drivers)

Tips and Tricks

On newer operating systems such as Vista or Windows 7, should the display driver crash, it will typically reset and avoid bringing down the entire system down with it. However, even if recovery is successful, performance can sometimes be noticeably degraded until reboot (for example, GPU getting stuck at 2D clocks). It is possible to manually reset the driver and get it back to normal without having to restart.

  • Open 'Device Manager'
  • Find your GPU, right click and select 'Disable' (Don't panic! Your screen will blank out and end up at low resolution!)
  • Do the same, except this time click 'Enable'

Performance should be back to normal now without having to spend time restarting.

Other Drivers

Every device in your computer has a driver. Later versions of windows are often able to find a driver for a given piece of hardware, but these drivers can sometimes be years old. Not only that, but older versions of vendor supplied drivers can sometimes cause issues in some circumstances. Thus, it is a good idea to install the latest drivers from a manufacturer.

Related software

DirectX

Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. To update DirectX visit Microsoft Download Center.

Compatibility

Windows 7: DirectX 9.0c, 10, 10.1, 11

Windows Vista: DirectX 9.0c, 10, 10.1, 11

Windows XP: DirectX 9.0c

Please note that graphics card needs to be compatibile with DirectX version that you want to use.

References

  1. ↑ Device driver on wikipedia