Most manufacturers offer automatic updates and upgrades for your computer’s video card driver and display, or you may want to manually upgrade your PCs video card driver.

Keeping your video card driver up to date will ensure you can enjoy the latest features, or help reduce compatibility problems with other new computer software or operating system changes.

Even when installing a new card, chances are the driver has been updated, so check online at the video card manufacturer’s website. Or, for video cards already installed, you need to know or find out what make or model it is and what driver is in use.

Finding What Video Card Is On Your Computer

On a Mac
On Mac OS X the graphics driver is part of the operating system. So you can only upgrade the graphics drivers by upgrading to a newer version of the operating system.

To find out which graphics card your Mac uses:

1. Click on the Apple menu in the upper left corner of the screen and select About this Mac.

2. Click on the More Info… button in the About this Mac dialog.

On a PC
Right-click on My Computer, select Properties, then click on Device Manager and click the little plus sign next to Display Adapters; or for Vista users, click to open Screen Resolution, select the Advanced tab, and click the Adapter tab.

Make a note of the name of the video card and driver that appears there.

Depending on the version of Windows you have, you may see an Update Device Driver Wizard that will search for a better or newer video card driver. Some video card manufacturers will offer automatic driver updates. Check your system’s Device Manager or Windows Update center for more information.

2. You can also search that driver name on the Web, or go right to the manufacturer’s website. Make sure it’s the right driver for your video card model or release version, and then click or follow instructions to download to your computer. You’ll probably be downloading a Zip file or a self-extracting Zip file. Save the video card driver file to an easy to remember place, like the desktop.

3. You’ll want to remove or uninstall the old driver first to make the install as smooth as possible, and avoid any possible conflicts. Go back to the Device Manager, as described above, select the current driver and click Remove.

4. Double-click on icon for the new video card driver you downloaded before. The Install Wizard will take over, or follow installation instructions. You will need to restart your computer once the new video card driver has been successfully installed.

Download Driver Links from some of the most common graphics card manufacturers:

NVIDIA: http://www.nvidia.com/content/drivers/drivers.asp
AMD: http://support.amd.com/us/gpudownload/Pages/index.aspxl
Intel: http://support.intel.com/support/graphics/