Graphics drivers

What does a graphics driver do?

A graphics driver sits between the Windows Display Driver Model, known as WDDM, and the physical graphics processor on your board. When an application asks Direct3D or Vulkan to draw a triangle, that request travels down through the user-mode driver, is packaged into a command buffer, and is then submitted to the kernel-mode driver that talks to the GPU hardware directly. The driver decides where textures live in video memory, how the command queue is prioritised, and when the finished frame is scanned out to the panel.

Modern GPUs contain several distinct engines: shader cores for general programmable work, dedicated units for ray tracing acceleration, video decode and encode blocks, and a display controller that generates the pixel timings for HDMI and DisplayPort outputs. The graphics driver exposes each of these to Windows through a shared abstraction, so a browser compositing a page and a game rendering at 4K both funnel their work through the same scheduler without stepping on each other.

Read the full graphics driver explainer

Compatibility is model-specific

A driver is associated with hardware identifiers, an operating-system driver model, and a processor architecture. Devices in the same category can expose different controllers, firmware interfaces, and optional feature layers, so a category name alone does not establish package compatibility.

Where this driver fits in Windows

The graphics driver sits between Windows, the applications you use, and the physical hardware. This layered view shows where the driver translates operating-system requests into device actions.