Drivers

Drivers

Drivers are software that makes devices run. Most computers and devices come with stock or 'reference' drivers from one of the device's manufacturers. These default drivers are usually very stable and work well across many platforms, but they rarely give the best performance the device is capable of on your particular machine. Fortunately, many manufacturers are constantly updating thier hardware drivers to improve them. These updated drivers can perform miracles with performance.

For our purposes, we are only concerned with a few drivers, the graphics card, sound card, motherboard, and the DXDirect drivers. New graphics card drivers are simply a must: you are cheating yourself if you dont get them, its simple as that. The graphics card manufacturers are extremely competitive and are always trying to improve thier drivers to get the most performance from thier cards.

A new sound card driver can also improve things, but in other ways. Sound cards tend to take up a lot of resources and cause conflicts. Newer drivers can many times solve these problems, causing less lockups, crashes, ect. Sound card manufacturers are also pretty competitive, so it pays to check every now and then to see if an improved driver is out.

Motherboard drivers can make a big performance difference in some cases. Everyone should check to see how old thier motherboard drivers are and update them if possible. NOTE: I am not talking about BIOS here, some people have been confused about the difference between flashing your BIOS and updating motherboard drivers. DONT flash your BIOS unless you know what you are doing!

Finally, DirectX. The newest version of DirectX is 8.0a, I believe, and its available from Microsoft support for free.

How do you know what device and driver you have? Get Sisoft Sandra, it will tell you all.

As a final note, these four sets of drivers are just the beginning. Its usually one of these four that causes poor graphics performance, but there are other drivers you might be concerned with. Drivers for joysticks are another thing you may want to check.

Graphics Card Drivers
Nvidia...for the newest Detonator 12.41 drivers Natural's Driver Page...massive selection of GEForce drivers...and others
Voodoofiles...3dfx haven
ATI Rage driver download page

Sound Card Drivers
Creative Labs Sound Blaster Drivers
Sound Blaster ALive 5.1 Drivers

Motherboard Drivers
VIA 4 in 1 Drivers

Assorted Drivers
Windrivers....many different drivers

How To Install GEForce Graphics Card Drivers:
(This works well with most cards)

Windows 98
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To prepare for installation of the drivers:

1 Start Microsoft Windows 98.
2 Click the Start button, point to Settings, and click Control Panel.
3 Double-click Display, and click the Settings tab.
4 Click Advanced, click the Adapter tab, then click Change.
5 Click Next, click Display a list of all the drivers in a specific location, so you can select the driver you want, then click Next.
6 Select Show all Hardware button, then select the Standard display types from the Manufacturers list.
7 Select Standard PCI Graphics Adapter (VGA) from the list, then select Next.
8 Click Next to install the driver, then click Finish.
9 Click Apply, then click Close.
10 Click Yes when Windows asks if you wish to restart the computer.

To install the drivers:

1 Click the Start button, point to Settings, and click Control Panel.
2 Double-click Display, and click the Settings tab.
3 Click Advanced, click the Adapter tab, then click Change.
4 Click Next, click Display a list of all the drivers in a specific location, so you can select the driver you want, then click Next.
5 Click Have Disk, select or type the path to the folder containing the driver files, then click OK. Windows should find files for your NVIDIA graphics chip. If Windows cannot find the files, check that the path name for the driver files is correct.
6 If Windows found the files, click OK, then click Next. Windows copies the files to the hard disk.
7 Click Finish, click Apply, then click Close.
8 Click Yes when Windows asks if you wish to restart the computer.