Undoubtedly, many gamers know that for the well-known games such as Minecraft or CS to work correctly, one of the most basic conditions is the presence of the latest OpenGL drivers installed in the system. How to update this driver package will now be considered, because, like any other software, they can be outdated. That is why sometimes there are problems with the launch of your favorite games.
OpenGL: how to update drivers in the simplest way?
First of all, if when starting a game or some specific application, the system reports that the OpenGL drivers need updating, you should use the most standard solution.
To activate the process, you must enter the standard "Device Manager", which can be done from the "Control Panel", the computer administration section or the devmgmgt.msc command through the "Run" console line and find the installed video adapter there.
The update can be launched using the command of the same name in the right-click menu or in the device properties section. If you specify automatic search, this may not give a result, and the system will inform you that the most suitable driver is already installed. Therefore, it is advisable to first go to the equipment manufacturer’s website, select your own model of the graphic card, download the latest driver, and during installation specify the location of the saved distribution.
How to update OpenGL on Windows 7 or any other system using specialized utilities?
For owners of NVIDIA and Radeon chips, the task can be somewhat simplified. As a rule, special control programs like PhysX and Catalyst are supplied pre-installed for them. That is why you can update the OpenGL driver with their help.
If for some reason such utilities are not available, you should simply download and integrate them into the system. If you have a constantly active Internet connection, they will be useful not only for setting up games, but also for automatically tracking the appearance of new versions of the necessary drivers, including OpenGL.
In principle, if the user does not like this option, you can use no less interesting programs like Driver Booster, which update the drivers for absolutely all hardware and software devices installed on a computer or laptop without user intervention. The application will automatically determine the version of the OpenGL driver during the system scan. How to update it? It is only necessary to agree with the proposal to install the found updates. Upon completion of the update process, a complete reboot is required.
Finally, you can install a special utility called OpenGL Extensions Viewer, with which you can find out the version of the installed driver package and update it to the latest version.
DirectX Update
However, the update may not give the desired positive result without updating the DirectX platform, which is a kind of connecting bridge between the hardware and the software package in terms of multimedia.
You can find out the installed version using the dxdiag command entered in the Run menu. You can download the new distribution from the official Microsoft support site in the Downloads section.
As already clear, DirectX OpenGL can be updated by the usual start of the installation process of the downloaded distribution. The advantage of this update also lies in the fact that a number of tests can be performed in the DirectX dialog box itself, including DirectSound, ffdshow, Direct3D, etc.
Why drivers are not updated?
If none of the above solutions suddenly helps, most likely the reason lies only in the fact that the video adapter does not support the installed version of OpenGL, so no matter how you try, the driver cannot be installed. The only way out is to install a more powerful video card.
Incidentally, this problem is most often encountered in the case of integrated video-on-board video chips that are built into motherboards. With discrete graphics cards, as a rule, there are no such problems (of course, provided that the chip is not too outdated and initially supports OpenGL technology). How to update drivers for such cards, it seems, is already clear. But sometimes it may be necessary to upgrade the JAVA Runtime platforms or even the Microsoft .NET Framework - you should not forget about this either. But as a rule, in most cases this is not required - just update DirectX and use the OpenGL Extensions Viewer utility in parallel.