Up until now, this had to be done manually. Gamers had to check the website of their video card manufacturer to see if a new driver has been released since the last driver installation.

A new driver then had to be downloaded and installed manually.

Today AMD announced that they have started adding ATI Radeon video card driver updates to the popular Steam gaming platform.

This new form of distribution makes sense, considering that gamers are the prime group of users who benefit from regular driver updates.

How does it work? Steam users can check for ATI Radeon driver updates by clicking on Steam >Update AMD Video Drivers.

steam amd driver update

Steam will then check if an updated video card driver is available, and prompt the user to download the video driver update.

steam video driver updates

The Install Now button triggers the installation of the drivers on the system. This installation is automatic with no option to customize it. The version that gets downloaded seems to be a universal installer, with a size of over 100 Megabytes. The largest driver at the official AMD Driver site has a size of less than 60 Megabytes.

Users with a slow Internet connection may want to consider that it will take them almost double the time to download the drivers from Steam.

The driver distribution on Steam cannot be automated at this point. Users still need to regularly check for updated drivers in the menu mentioned above, to find out if they are running the latest drivers.

It would be nice if the updates could be automated, for instance by moving the drivers to the Steam library to use Steam’s standard way of updating, which can be set to be completely automatic.

Still, the availability on Steam is a big step for AMD, as it brings the latest drivers directly to a large group of gamers. It does not get a lot more comfortable than this.

Anyway, some free programs to update Windows drivers exist. We have reviewed Driver Max in the past. The application has made some leaps version wise. It can not only be used to scan for Windows driver updates but also to identify unknown hardware or to perform device driver backups. A click on the check for driver updates button in the updates and identification category will start the scan of the computer system’s hardware.

The results will be displayed on the website of the software developer in table form listing the name of the device as well as the installed version and the latest version in the database. A disk symbol at the end of each line leads directly to the download of the device driver.

The download pages list all downloads for the selected device. There is no mentioning if the drivers are alpha, beta or final drivers and it is recommended to perform a search on a search engine to verify the result. The suggested update for the outdated Intel Chipset Software Installation on the test system turned out to be an alpha driver. A quick search revealed a final driver that was available for download.

The list of downloads could use some filtering options to filter languages and alpha or beta drivers. Still, it is a better alternative than searching for all device driver updates manually. It will at least list the drivers that are not up to date anymore which will narrow down the manual process to a minimum. A free registration is required to use the program.

A similar program is 3DP Chip (read: Computer Driver Updates) which will only scan the most important components of a computer system.

One free driver update software is RadarSysnc 2009. It can be downloaded freely from the developers website and does not require registration to download or update drivers on the computer system. The software was not completely free in the past which has changed with this year’s version.

The process is as simply as it sounds. The option to scan a computer system will be available after starting the driver updater. All components that updates were found for are displayed in a list afterwards. The list contains the name of the component, the status and a link to details about the update.

The very same menu contains a button to Download all driver updates at once which will change the status to Ready To Install. A click on that will install the selected driver.

The Detail window is important as it displays information about the installed driver and the updated driver such as versions of both so that it is possible to compare them before installing them. It furthermore contains information about the driver that has been downloaded including links to the developer’s website. The menu contains additional links and options like reporting a bad download, sending a link to a friend or downloading a different driver (other operating system or version).

A scan of a test system was mostly successful. One problem that was encountered was that the software found an updated video card driver which turned out to be a Windows Vista update. Unfortunately the test system was running Windows XP. Could be a one time blunder but it could eventually lead to installations of the wrong drivers on a system. So its best to always check the information the program is providing before installing any drivers on the system.