If you open up Device Manager in Windows, you'll see a huge number of hardware components
that make up your PC, and the vast majority of them require drivers.
Those pieces of software that sit between your components and your operating system
so that software can talk to your hardware correctly. And you've likely been told that it's very important to keep your drivers updated.
But is that really necessary considering just how many components need them?
I mean, that sounds like a lot of work and you've got better things to do anyway.
Let's break it down, starting with your GPU. If there's only one driver you ever bother updating on your PC, it should probably be
this one. As game developers keep trying to make their titles look more impressive by adding support
for newer technologies, having the most recent GPU drivers can make a real difference in
both your game's appearance as well as your frame rates.
This can include enabling or enhancing support for features like NVIDIA's DLSS on certain
titles and G-Sync on certain monitors, or AMD's Super Resolution and FreeSync if you
have a card from Team Red. Even if you're just using your processors built in graphics, driver updates can still
boost performance in certain games and enable greater control over your display settings,
as well as fix weird graphical bugs that don't have an obvious solution.
You know the ones. But what about the rest of your system?
There are a few cases in which it's a good idea to make sure you're downloading the
specific drivers for that component from the manufacturer rather than using the default
Windows drivers, but it might not be as important to continually update them.
One good example is your chipset. This is a chip that handles much of your system's input, output, or I.O.
Without correct chipset drivers, you may find that some of your ports or onboard devices
don't work quite as intended. Sometimes they'll show up as components with error notifications on them in Device Manager,
for example. Over the years, Windows has gotten better about auto-installing drivers for the chipset,
but even now, you'll definitely want to pick up the official chipset driver from AMD, Intel,
or your motherboard's manufacturer to ensure all your components are enabled properly.
Chipset drivers can even offer added functionality, such as the different power options AMD provides
with chipsets for its Zen 2 CPUs. And the good thing is that after you do this once, updating it again isn't as critical
as it is with the GPU. Another driver that you might want to take a few minutes to install yourself is the audio
driver. These days, those real-tech chipsets that come integrated into motherboards play along
just fine with the default Windows drivers, but custom drivers from your motherboard
manufacturer can give you other features that are really useful, such as controlling amplification
levels or allowing the front and back audio ports to be treated as two separate devices.
Really convenient if you like to leave your headphones plugged in, but still use the desktop
speakers. And of course, you'll definitely want to install custom drivers if you've splurged on
an expensive add-in sound card. Finally, any other components that might not be an integral part of the standard PC will
benefit from having the official drivers installed. I'm talking about webcams, AIO liquid coolers, and anything that uses RGB.
Official drivers will again give you greater control, such as focus options for a camera
or custom fan curves for a cooler. But unlike with graphic drivers, it isn't super critical that you update chipset, audio,
or peripheral drivers religiously. That being said, if you're experiencing issues with any of these components, or if there's
news of a security hole, definitely check for an updated driver, as there's at least
a decent chance a recent driver release will contain bug fixes and security patches.
And we'd be remiss if we didn't mention firmware. While firmware and drivers are two different things, it can still be important to update
your system firmware in certain circumstances.
Probably the best known example of computer firmware is the BIOS, which is the basic code
that your motherboard needs to start up and communicate with the other components.
While it typically isn't crucial to grab every BIOS update as soon as it's released, it can
be a good idea to do the update if it's necessary for upgrading to a new OS or processor to fix
the security vulnerability or to unlock a new feature.
As we've seen on recent motherboards that support resizable BAR for graphics cards,
for example. Other components also contain firmware, notably discrete graphics cards and SSDs.
Again, firmware updates for these components can fix bugs and sometimes even improve performance,
but I wouldn't lose sleep if you haven't installed the latest version recently.
TLDR, keep your GPU drivers up to date, install the official drivers for your other components,
and just check back for a new version if you're having a problem or need a feature update.
But don't expect new drivers to perform miracles like expand the capacity of your RAM.
There's a special download link for that.
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your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future.