Drivers

Drivers


Drivers are used within all systems that allow need to communicate with separate hardware and peripherals, they allow the input or output of a piece hardware to be understood by piece if software by translating the information sent into a language that the software can understand.

All consoles must have the required hardware and drivers installed to run games, carry out processes, handle data, output data and have data in putted without these drivers nothing would be possible.

Sound Card Drivers



Sound cards are used within computer systems to handle, process and output the sound of the computer, this can be from a basic one speaker system to a speaker system with numerous speakers.

These sound cards use drivers to allow them to communicate with the operating systems and any software that is being run on the operating system, the driver is a very small application which is dedicated to receiving and sending the information via the sound card and then converting it into a code/language which can be understand and used by the operating.

There are thousands of sound card drivers because each sound card can be made with a different language therefore when a new sound card is built in sometimes you must download or install the driver yourself however most of the time the sound cards will use a standard sound driver which the operating system will already have stored in its system.

Sound cards are the only reason consoles such as the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii output sound through mono, stereo, surround sound and 3D surrond.

Graphics Card Drivers


Graphic cards are used within computers to handle, process and output the graphical tasks within a computer, they usually have there own dedicated RAM unless there shared which allows them to process data quickly and efficiently.

Just like the sound card for the operating system to communicate with the graphics card it requires a driver to translate the information being sent to the operating system, although the graphics cards has a lot more power and processing tasks the driver software is still a very small program.

All consoles require a graphics card to run, process and handle of the graphical content being created by the games, without the Graphics cards the consoles wouldn't be able to cope with the processing power required by the game.

Network Interface Controller


The network interface called is a piece of hardware which offers the computer to be able to have an internet connection, it handles internet data being sent and received.


The network interface card uses connections such as Ethernet, Wifi and Token Ring to receive and send the information, this network interface controller uses a series of layers of physical and data layers. These layers then allow for the communicate over LAN and WAN.

All of the latest consoles such as the Xbox 360, Playstation 3 and Nintendo all have built in Network interface controllers. This allows the consoles to play online, over LAN's, download updates, download games, surf the internet and use streaming applications.