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Video Card Drivers

R

redbox

Golden Member
I am wondering how exactly video card drivers work. Clifnote exaclty. From A to Z a summerization of how they work and interact with the card the os and any games you might be running. I want this to be a technical answer and not ATI does it better than Nvidia. It doesn't even have to be a specific video card just in general. After the regular drivers are explained I would also like a description of how multi-gpu drivers work and compare to the single gpu drivers.

I hope to get some meaningful discussions going on this topic.

Thank you ahead of time.
 
The shortest most basic answer I can give is that the drivers take rendering-related commands, like to rotate a scene by so many degrees, and translate them into code that the video card understands.
 
Drivers allow the operating system to communicate with hardware.

In the case of video cards a game running on an operating system will talk to the video card through the drivers.

 
Originally posted by: munky
The shortest most basic answer I can give is that the drivers take rendering-related commands, like to rotate a scene by so many degrees, and translate them into code that the video card understands.
Click to expand...

I think he's wanting a big, drawn out explanation.

nice link Nightmare225

 
Basic idea:

__________
|Application|
|Oper. Sys.|
|...Drivers..|
|...BIOS......|
|.Firmware.|
|.Hardware.|
--------------

Each level can communicate only with the level directly below it, so that if your hardware changes, it comes with its own firmware/BIOS (somewhat interchangeable terms I think) and the drivers communicate with that BIOS, irregardless of the actual hardware differences. Then, your OS communicates via the drivers, and your application communicates with the OS. Basically each one is an abstraction layer; the drivers act to "abstract," or cause to seem different/simpler, the lowest level code that runs on the video card itself so that the operating system can just call "do_some_video_op" using DirectX or whatever and the video system does whatever it needs to do based on the physical hardware. In other words, drivers help to modularize the system at some level.
 
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