Why are drivers needed?
- Thread starter Edward78
- Start date
Soldato
- Joined
- 17 Aug 2012
- Posts
- 6,593
- Location
- Tamworth, UK
Everything need a interface to take to hardware, a single motherboard couldn't possibly talk to every type of peripheral by stock. Think about trying to update them if they were centralized!
No, I don't mean the motherboard doing it, I mean a chip on the GPU, sound card or what ever it is... The chip says what it is & how to run it, the OS would need "interface" software so you can get to settings... Without that the board would still work (ie in Linux the GPU would be the same as windows), am I explaining well enough???
Last edited:
What you seem to be thinking of is "drivers on the hardware" - which works, until you realise there's a lot of post-production optimisation goes on.
GPUs in particular get a driver update every time a new triple-A game comes out. At best, the onboard driver supplied with the hardware would be the equivalent of the CD in the GPU box that everyone throws away. It would still be of constant benefit to perform online updates.
GPUs in particular get a driver update every time a new triple-A game comes out. At best, the onboard driver supplied with the hardware would be the equivalent of the CD in the GPU box that everyone throws away. It would still be of constant benefit to perform online updates.
Technically possible, but not that practical. It would be harder to keep on-board drivers up to date than having the operating system handle it.
Think of the issues and potential risks surrounding updating your motherboard's BIOS. Outside of the overclocking / benchmarking community, most people tend to only update their BIOS if they really have to - if they need support for a newer cpu, or a major bug fix. I don't think many people would want this for their GPU, sound card and so on.
Also, it's not that practical for the manufacturers. The cards they make could be used in a Windows PC (many different versions), Linux PC (many different versions) and possibly Mac too (many different versions). That's a lot of operating system support to hardwire in. Much better to let all those different operating systems have drivers you install as needed (or as is increasingly the case, native drivers).
Think of the issues and potential risks surrounding updating your motherboard's BIOS. Outside of the overclocking / benchmarking community, most people tend to only update their BIOS if they really have to - if they need support for a newer cpu, or a major bug fix. I don't think many people would want this for their GPU, sound card and so on.
Also, it's not that practical for the manufacturers. The cards they make could be used in a Windows PC (many different versions), Linux PC (many different versions) and possibly Mac too (many different versions). That's a lot of operating system support to hardwire in. Much better to let all those different operating systems have drivers you install as needed (or as is increasingly the case, native drivers).
Just not possible, you need many abstraction layers to have the PC as a platform people can easily develop for.
To take games as an example, developers write against the OpenGL or DirectX API. The drivers translate those API calls into instructions for the GPU itself.
Without drivers, developers would have to write separate implementations for every single graphics card on the market.
To take games as an example, developers write against the OpenGL or DirectX API. The drivers translate those API calls into instructions for the GPU itself.
Without drivers, developers would have to write separate implementations for every single graphics card on the market.
Remember the DOS days when you had to tell the game which type of soundcard you were using, and if it didn't know about it, no sound for you?
Associate
- Joined
- 21 Apr 2016
- Posts
- 1,967
- Location
- Oh Canada!
Yup. Used to actually have to know what hardware you had. If you had an EGA monitor and you picked VGA mode for your game, no video for you. If you picked soundblaster but could only support adlib, no sound for you.