ATI Radeon Drivers

Computer experts know that their computers and the devices installed on them (sound cards, printers, modems, etc) do not communicate directly with each other. Instead, the computer communicates with the device through a "translator" or "driver."

For example, let's say that you want to print something.

When you click on the "print" command, your computer sends a command to the printer's driver which, in turn, tells the printer to start printing. Think of the term "driver" in terms of a chauffeured char.

You know that you want to go someplace so you tell your chauffer (or driver) where you want to go and then he/she takes you there!

If, however, you aren't a computer expert, you might not have given a thought to the different drivers on your computer until now.

If you haven't been paying attention to your drivers, they might be woefully out of date! Out of date drivers can slow down your computer and make even the simplest tasks seem annoyingly difficult!

ATI Radeon and It's Drivers

One of the more common driver manufacturing companies is ATI Radeon. ATI Radeon is a subsidiary of ATI Technologies, a company known for being one of the industry's leading designers of GPUs (graphic processing units), Chipsets and Video Display Cards.

According to the people who build their own computers, if you want the images on your screen to look pretty and move as quickly as you do, you want your video cards, drivers, etc. manufactured and designed by ATI.

ATI Radeon has been manufacturing products since 2000. Their Series R100 was the first graphics processor manufactured by ATI to be completely compliant with DirectX and was known for its low bandwidth use and its HyperZ technology which made the driver incredibly efficient.

Their newest series is the R700 which is based on the R600 series. This newest driver incarnation is ATI Radeon's fastest series yet.

It has lots of stream processors, uses less power and has GDDR5 support for its RV770 chip (a very high end product).

The drivers manufactured by ATI Radeon work with Windows, Mac, Linux, FreeBSD, Amiga, BeOS, and FOSS operating systems. Some of these systems even have open source support for the ATI Radeon drivers.

Outdated Drivers and How To Update Them

One of the most noticeable signs that your drivers are out of date is the warning your computer gives you when it can no longer get a device to work. Drivers don't notify you when they need updating.

It is up to you to keep up with the updates as they are released.

Another sign that your drivers are outdated is that a normally quick process becomes incredibly slow.

For example, if you want to run a game on your computer and it takes an extraordinarily long time to load and open for you, this could be a sign that your operating system is having trouble communicating with your driver.

So what do you do?

You have a couple of options available to you. You can either visit the website of your device's manufacturer to check for available updates (often the manufacturer will have a way for you to scan for outdated models of their products) and download the updates the site offers to you, or you can take advantage of the free scan offered by DriverScan.

The DriverScan scanner offers a free scan of your entire computer and it will tell you if you have any drivers that need updating and how to go about updating process.

From there you can either use the program to do the updating for you, or update each driver manually.