What Is My Graphics Driver?

Your graphics driver is a piece of software that supports the graphics display hardware in your computer. It tells the operating system how to interact with the hardware, and interprets hardware signals for the operating system.

Graphics Device Driver

An operating system must be written to work with many different types of graphics display devices. It relies on device drivers, small software programs written for a specific hardware device, to tell it how to interact with the device. Every graphics device requires a device driver.

Manufacturer Specific

Each graphics device manufacturer requires the use of their own device drivers. There are no generic graphics drivers that support all types of graphics devices. A manufacturer may, however, distribute one piece of software that supports many of their graphics devices.

Identifying Your Graphics Driver

You will need to know the platform on which your display card is built. The two major graphics processing units (GPU) are created by ATI and Nvidia. These are sold to a variety of manufacturers who design display cards around them. You will need to know the platform and the specific model of the display device in order to match it up with the correct software driver.

References

• Tech Target: Device Driver
• N2E: How Do I Find What Kind of Video Card (GPU) My Computer Has?