Hardware drivers category page Microsoft Download Center

Microsoft 365

Premium Office apps, extra cloud storage, advanced security, and more—all in one convenient subscription

What will you do?

Office 365 unlocks the potential of your device, and brings out the best in you

Surface Pro

The most versatile laptop

Popular Hardware drivers downloads

Microsoft® ODBC Driver 13.1 for SQL Server® — Windows, Linux, & macOS

The Microsoft ODBC Driver for SQL Server provides native connectivity from Windows, Linux, & macOS to Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Azure SQL Database.

Surface Pro 4 Drivers and Firmware

All current drivers and firmware for the Surface Pro 4; including optional WinTab drivers

Surface Pro 3

All current software, firmware, and drivers for the Surface Pro 3; including optional WinTab drivers

Surface Pro 7 Drivers and Firmware

All current drivers and firmware for the Surface Pro 7

Microsoft® OLE DB Driver 18 for SQL Server®

This page is no longer maintained. Please read the details below.

Surface Dock 2 Firmware and Drivers

All current software, firmware, and drivers for the Surface Dock 2

Surface Book 2 Drivers and Firmware

All current drivers and firmware for the Surface Book 2

Microsoft® ODBC Driver 17 for SQL Server® — Windows, Linux, & macOS

This page is no longer maintained. Please read the details below.

Surface Pro 6 Drivers and Firmware

All current drivers and firmware for the Surface Pro 6

Surface Book Drivers and Firmware

All current drivers and firmware for the Surface Book; including optional WinTab drivers

WDDM 1.2 and Windows 8

This section provides details about new features and enhancements in Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) version 1.2, which is available starting with WindowsВ 8. It also describes hardware requirements, implementation guidelines, and usage scenarios.

In this section

This topic describes the WDDM Version 1.2 feature set, which includes several new enhancements that improve performance, reliability, and the overall end-user experience.

WindowsВ 8 provides enhancements and optimizations to the display infrastructure to further improve the user experience.

Microsoft Direct3D offers a rich collection of 3-D graphics APIs, which are widely used by software applications for complex visualization and game development. This section describes feature improvements and WindowsВ 8В Direct3D software and hardware requirements.

WDDM drivers in WindowsВ 8 require INF changes to the graphics driver. The most notable change is in the feature score. WDDM 1.2 drivers require a higher feature score than earlier WDDM drivers. This section describes all relevant INF requirements for WindowsВ 8 graphics drivers

The Windows 8 installation graphics driver behavior is designed to ensure that, whenever possible, our customers get a graphics driver that has been tested and certified for Windows 8. This behavior is defined by the rules that are described in this section.

This section describes WDDM 1.2 driver enforcement guidelines.

Introduction

The WDDM was introduced with WindowsВ Vista as a replacement of the WindowsВ XP or Windows 2000 Display Driver Model (XDDM). With its introduction in WindowsВ Vista, the WDDM architecture offered functionality to enable new features such as Desktop Composition, enhanced fault tolerance, video memory manager, GPU scheduler, cross process sharing of Direct3D surfaces, and so on. WDDM was specifically designed for modern graphics devices that were Microsoft Direct3DВ 9 with pixel shader 2.0 or better, and had all the necessary hardware features to support the WDDM features. WDDM for Windows Vista was referred to as «WDDM 1.0.»

WindowsВ 7 made incremental changes to the driver model for supporting WindowsВ 7 features and capabilities and was referred to as «WDDM 1.1.» WDDM 1.1 is a strict superset of WDDM 1.0. WDDM 1.1 introduced support for Microsoft Direct3DВ 11, Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) hardware acceleration, Connecting and Configuring Displays, DirectX Video Acceleration (VA) High-Definition (DXVA-HD), and many other features. For more details on these features, see the Graphics Guide for Windows 7.

WindowsВ 8 introduces an array of new features and capabilities that require graphics driver changes. These incremental changes benefit end users and developers, and improve system reliability. The WDDM driver model that enables these WindowsВ 8 features is referred to as «WDDM 1.2.» WDDM 1.2 is a superset of WDDM 1.1 and WDDM 1.0. These changes can be represented in a simplified form, as shown in this table:

XDDM on Server 2008

XDDM on Server 2008 R2

Operating system	Driver models supported	Direct3D versions supported	Features enabled
Windows Vista	WDDM 1.0 XDDM on Server and limited UMPC	D3D9, D3D10	Scheduling, Memory Management, Fault tolerance, D3D9 & 10
Windows Vista SP1 / Windows 7 client pack	D3D9, D3D10, D3D10.1	+ BGRA support in D3D10, D3D 10.1
Windows 7	D3D9, D3D10, D3D10.1, D3D11	GDI Hardware acceleration, DXVA HD, D3D11
Windows 8	WDDM 1.2	D3D9, D3D10, D3D10.1, D3D11, D3D11.1	Smooth Rotation, Stereoscopic 3-D, D3D11 Video, D3D11.1, etc.

NoteВ В With WindowsВ 8 and WDDM 1.2, XDDM is no longer supported, and XDDM drivers do not load on WindowsВ 8 client or server. For the scenarios that are traditionally dependent on XDDM, WindowsВ 8 allows migration to WDDM as shown in the next table.

independent hardware vendors (IHVs) and system builders should adopt the alternative WDDM solution that works best for their customers. This means that a WindowsВ 8 system will always have a WDDM-based driver.

Currently using	WDDM support for XDDM scenarios
XDDM VGA Driver	Microsoft Basic Display Driver
XDDM IHV Driver	System builders need to work with the IHV to get: Display-Only WDDM Driver or Full Graphics WDDM Driver Alternately Microsoft Basic Display Driver
XDDM Virtualization Driver	System builders need to work with the IHV to get a new Display-Only Virtualization Driver
CSM for Int10 support on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI)	No longer needed with UEFI Graphics Output Protocol (GOP) support
Remote Desktop Access/Collab	Desktop Duplication API
Remote Session Driver	No change, no support for
Client	Server	Client running in a virtual environment	Server virtual
Full Graphics	Required as boot device	Optional	Optional	Optional
Display-Only	Not allowed	Optional	Optional	Optional
Render-Only	Optional as non-primary adapter	Optional	Optional	Optional
Headless	Not allowed	Optional	N/A	N/A

WDDM 1.2 is required for all systems that are shipped with WindowsВ 8. WDDM 1.0 and WDDM 1.1 will continue to work on WindowsВ 8. However, the best experience and WindowsВ 8-specific features are enabled only by a WDDM 1.2 driver.

Как проверить версию WDDM

В данной статье показаны действия, с помощью которых можно проверить (узнать) версию WDDM поддерживаемую графическим драйвером видеоадаптера в операционной системе Windows.

Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) — это архитектура графических драйверов для видеокарты под управлением Microsoft Windows, начиная с Windows Vista. WDDM является заменой для архитектуры видеодрайверов Windows XP (XDDM/XPDM) и направлена на повышение производительности графики, новую функциональность и стабильность.

WDDM предоставляет функциональные возможности, необходимые для визуализации рабочего стола и приложений с помощью диспетчера рабочего стола — диспетчера составных окон, работающего поверх Direct3D.

WDDM также поддерживает интерфейсы новой инфраструктуры DXGI (DirectX Graphics Infrastructure), необходимые для основных операций создания и управления устройством. Спецификация WDDM требует видеокарту, поддерживающую по меньшей мере Direct3D 9, и должна реализовывать интерфейсы до Direct3D 9 для совместимости со старыми приложениями Direct3D, также WDDM дополнительно может реализовывать интерфейсы для Direct3D 10/10.1 и выше.

Дополнительную информацию о WDDM можно узнать ➯ здесь и ➯ здесь.

Как проверить версию WDDM поддерживаемую графическим драйвером

Чтобы проверить (узнать) версию WDDM поддерживаемую графическим драйвером видеоадаптера, нажмите сочетание клавиш + R, в открывшемся окне Выполнить введите (скопируйте и вставьте) dxdiag и нажмите клавишу Enter ↵.

В окне «Средство диагностики DirectX» выберите вкладку Экран и в разделе Драйверы вы увидите поддерживаемую версию WDDM.

Microsoft Basic Display Driver

In Windows 8, The Microsoft Basic Display Driver (MSBDD) is the in-box display driver that replaces the XDDM VGA Save and VGA PnP drivers.

The key benefits of using MSBDD are as follows:

• MSBDD helps to enable a consistent end user and developer experience because it is compatible with DirectX APIs and technologies such as the Desktop Composition.
• Server scenarios can benefit from the higher functionality (specifically, features like reboot-less updates, dynamic start and stop, and so on) that are provided by the WDDM driver model.
• MSBDD supports Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) Graphics Output Protocol (GOP).
• MSBDD works on both XDDM and WDDM hardware.

MSBDD is the default in-box display driver that is loaded during setup, in safe mode, in the absence of an IHV graphics driver, or when the inbox installed graphics IHV driver is not working or is disabled. The primary purpose of this driver is to enable Windows to write to the display controller’s linear frame buffer.

MSBDD can use the video BIOS to manage modes and resolutions on a single monitor. On UEFI platforms, MSBDD inherits the linear frame buffer that is set during boot; in this case, no mode or resolution changes are possible. As shown in Figure 1 Scenarios supported by Microsoft Basic Display Driver, MSBDD is used in the following scenarios:

Server: Server configurations that lack WDDM-capable graphics hardware can use MSBDD.

Windows setup: In the early phases of Windows setup, just before the final boot, only the MSBDD is loaded.

For example, a user has an older platform that is currently in working condition although it has no in-box graphics driver support for Windows 8. The user upgrades to Windows 8 and uses MSBDD for the setup, installation, and to retrieve an IHV driver if one is available.

Driver installation, in the following cases:

• When a user is installing a new WDDM IHV driver, MSBDD is used during the transition (from the point when the old WDDM IHV driver is uninstalled to the point before the new IHV driver is installed).
• When a user encounters problems installing the latest WDDM IHV driver, the user or system can disable the current graphics driver and fallback to using MSBDD.

Driver upgrade: By using MSBDD, there is no need to go through a system reboot when upgrading to the IHV-recommended driver.

Safe mode: In this mode, only trusted drivers get loaded; this includes MSBDD.

Figure 1 Scenarios Supported by Microsoft Basic Display Driver

WDDM 2.1 Features

This topic provides details about new features and enhancements in Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) version 2.1, which is available starting with the WindowsВ 10 Anniversary Edition.

WDDM 2.1 itself is optional. If implemented, it is a collection of mandatory and optional driver capabilities. Any driver which supports any of those capabilities must support all of the mandatory ones. Support can be validated by HLK tests, but Dxgkrnl will check for consistency in the capabilities and DDIs.

WDDM 2.1 Requirements Table

Feature	Applicability
Offer and reclaim improvements	Mandatory
Video memory management	Optional
HW protected content reliability improvements	Select Hardware
Application support with Windows GameDVR	Mandatory
Indirect display	Select Hardware
Driver store and side-by-side installation	Mandatory
DirectX memory surface sharing for camera/capture scenarios	Mandatory

WDDM 2.1 supports the following D3D versions: D3D9, D3D10, D3D10.1, D3D11, D3D11.x, D3D12

Offer and reclaim improvements

A new DDI, PFND3DDDI_RECLAIMALLOCATIONS3CB was created to reduce memory footprint of applications running in background mode. This interface will enable applications to offer resources that are acceptable to fully de-commit, when going into the background. As a result, the Process Lifetime Manager will be able to reclaim more memory from background apps that use DirectX, which leads to less background application terminations when under memory pressure.

Other DDI changes:

For more information about offer and reclaim resources, see Offer and reclaim changes.

Application support with Windows GameDVR

Windows 10 Anniversary edition includes improved ability to use the Windows game bar and GameDVR with full screen games.

WDDM 2.1 drivers are required to support a performance feature called present batching, which adds multi-threading support for flip model swapchains. This is an essential feature that ensures that full screen games with game bar run at the same level of performance as on earlier versions of Windows.

The following lists the new DDIs created to enable this feature:

Indirect Display

In WDDM 2.1, Indirect Display enables USB connected displays to participate in all the same user experiences as any other monitor. In addition, an Indirect Display driver is a User Mode driver, which is simpler to develop than a kernel mode driver, and as a result contributes to increased overall system reliability.

In WDDM 2.1, the following USB display features/experiences are enabled:

When connecting a USB display to a Windows platform or upgrading operating systems, the proper drivers will be downloaded and installed from Windows update.

Connecting monitors to USB display hardware will detect and set the correct monitor topology, resolution and DPI.

Users can change monitor resolution and scaling on the monitor.

Users can disconnect USB displays and reconnect displays without unexpected side effects.

Monitor topology is retained through disconnect and reconnect to the same monitor.

USB displays functions properly in various power states including sleep and hibernation.

For more information about indirect display, see Indirect Display Driver Model Overview

Driver Store and Side-by-Side driver installation

WDDM 2.1 introduces installation of graphics drivers through the driver store. This mechanism of installing graphics drivers improves the resiliency of driver updates from Windows Update, eliminating driver file version mismatches resulting in system instabilities and user initiated reboots. Each subsequent driver update will be run directly from its unique location in the driver store (i.e. System32\DriverStore\FileRepository\[…] ), thus avoiding driver file overwrites and mismatches.

Feature implementation of driver store requires changes to the graphics driver INF file in order to ensure that the driver files get copied to the unique driver repository. The INF changes are explained in more details in the INF Requirements section in this document.

WDDM 2.1 introduces the transition of the GPU shader compiler stack from DirectX Byte Code (DXBC) to DirectX Intermediate Language (DXIL), a new format for transmitting shader instructions to the GPU. Transition to DXIL delivers the following benefits to developers:

Programmability — Ease-of-development is improved and complexity of the shader creation process is reduced for developers by minimizing differences between GPU programming syntax and CPU languages that developers are familiar with.

• Runtime Shader Performance is enabled to deliver improved performance.
• DXIL provides a new set of intrinsic that enables sharing of data across the lanes of the SIMD processors in GPUs.

Workflow Flexibility — DXIL enables developers to be in control of their own custom tools and optimization passes and choose which compilation steps are applied at build time versus runtime.

Advanced Language Features — An evolved language provides key features that eliminate differences between GPU code and CPU code, and flatten the learning curve for GPU programmers.

With these features focusing on providing benefits for developers, end users will see the benefits in improved performance of new or updated games even when run on existing hardware.

DirectX Memory Surface Sharing for Camera/Capture Scenarios

In WDDM 2.1, A frame server component was introduced to share a camera or capture device across multiple processes concurrently. This enables saving of captured frames to one memory location where multiple applications can read from, as opposed to copying the image data between processes and co-processes multiple times. This feature provides more efficient management of captured pictures across multiple processes, power savings, bandwidth reduction and latency reduction for WDDM 2.1 compliant hardware and drivers which results in performance gains for applications and users.

The frame server allocates captured image as a cross-process shareable memory, and shares this memory out to processes requesting access. It is worthy to note that since the frame server broadcasts the texture to multiple client processes, the texture must support concurrent reading. Currently NV12 textures is supported for this purpose.

Pipeline State Object (PSO) Caching and Library

Introduced in D3D12, Pipeline State Object (PSO) is an interface which represents the graphics pipeline instructions and resources (aka state) as a unified object to reduce mismatch between D3D and driver decompositions of the state. Running graphically demanding applications and games requires creating a vast number of PSOs.

WDDM 2.1 PSO library and caching enables the gaming applications to store a PSO on physical storage after being created during the initial run. This provides D3D runtime the ability to retrieve the pre-created PSOs from the library in future instances thus reduce the PSO extraction time. For example, when running a game after the first time or after rebooting the PC, content will be loaded from the physical library as saved PSOs.

Start of Pipeline GPU Timestamps

In WDDM 2.1, the capability to retrieve start of graphics events’ timestamps in the GPU pipeline was introduced. This new feature, used in conjunction with the end of pipeline timestamps, provides developers with a clear and fine-grained visualization of the parallelization, pipelining, and timing of their application’s activities occurring on the GPU. Provided with the execution time of each event, developers can further optimize their code and investigate inefficiencies and other performance issues.

This feature contributes to enabling ‘real-time, low overhead’ GPU performance data gathering and at the same time, provides enough information to visualize and measure workloads on GPUs. The goal of the feature is to provide enough information to reconstruct the exact order and duration of operations executed by the GPU, so that tools can visualize parallelism and pipelining with an engine, measure GPU workloads, and identify potential synchronization issues.

Viewing GPU Microcode

WDDM 2.1 enables developers to further optimize their shaders by presenting GPU microcode viewing. Developers program the graphics pipeline through creating shaders in HLSL, which then are compiled to an intermediate language for the GPU driver. The driver runs additional compilations and optimizations to convert this code to GPU-specific instructions which remained opaque to the developers. With this feature, developers are presented readable GPU-specific code to evaluate the extent of their shader optimization and speed.

This feature enables the UMD to comment on each programmable stage of the graphics pipeline (aka. shaders) and return actionable information on the programmer’s use or misuse of those shaders. The GPU-specific microcode is disassembled and presented in readable string format along with the UMD comments. Developers can view their HLSL code mapping to readable GPU code side by side which enables them to dynamically modify their code and see the compiler optimization results on the GPU code side.

Determining WDDM Version

WDDM 2.1 Caps

Drivers will report WDDM 2.1 support through DXGK_DRIVERCAPS::WDDMVersion with a new version constant:

Dxgkrnl will not use the WDDMVersion cap as a way to determine which new features are supported—that task will be left to other caps or DDI presence. However, if the driver reports WDDM 2.1 support through the WDDMVersion cap, dxgkrnl will validate that caps or DDIs required by WDDM 2.1 are present and fail to create the adapter if they are not. Inconsistent caps will result in failure to create adapter or segment.

Applications, existing or newer must not have to query the driver model to take advantage of any Windows 10 Anniversary Edition features which are enabled through platform improvements such as the ones outlined here. Any capability changes must be surfaced through the respective runtime.

A new constant has been added to match KMT_DRIVERVERSION_WDDM_2_1:

DDI interface versions in the KMD are as follows:

Graphics INF Requirements

WDDM 2.1 graphics drivers have different INF requirements as compared to the WDDM 2.0 or previous drivers. These are:

WDDM 2.1 must have an identical Feature Score as that of the WDDM 2.0 graphics driver (D1).

WDDM 2.1 graphics drivers must use a different OS INF install section.

WDDM 2.1 graphics driver INF changes for “Driver Store» installation.

Driver files, 32 and 64 bit, will remain in and be loaded from the driver store. WoW64 file system redirection does not apply to the driver store. IHVs may specify subfolders by using standard INF syntax to create, for example, a WoW64 folder under the unique driver store folder if desired.

The following is an example of how an INF supporting run from driver store differs from previous behavior.

To specify a subfolder, drivers may use syntax as shown in the following example:

Driver Versioning

The driver DLL and SYS files for a graphics adapter or chipset must have a properly formatted file version.

The driver information file (.inf), kernel mode driver (.sys), and user mode driver (.dll) file version info must match. In addition, version info for any files identified in the [SignatureAttributes] section of the .inf as PETrust binaries must match the .inf. It is recommended that file version info for additional binaries in a driver package match the .inf.

To be consistent with the prevailing file versioning requirements for legacy operating systems, file version formatting must follow an AA.BB.CCCCC.DDDDD pattern where:

• AA indicates the driver model version of the most capable device listed in the .inf
• BB (for WDDM 1.2 drivers and higher)
  • Indicates the highest available D3D Feature Level of the most capable device listed in the .inf
• BB (for WDDM 1.1 drivers and lower)
  • Indicates the highest available DDI version supported by the most capable device listed in the .inf
• CCCCC is a number up to 5 digits from 0 to 65535 chosen by the vendor
• DDDDD is a number up to 5 digits from 0 to 65535 chosen by the vendor

Values for AA field:

Driver Model	AA value
WDDM v2.1	21
WDDM v2.0	20
WDDM v1.3	10
WDDM v1.2	9
WDDM v1.1	8
WDDM v1.0	7
XDDM	6

Values for BB field (WDDM 1.2 and later):

DirectX Feature Level	BB value
12_x	21
12_1	20
12_0	19
11_1	18
11_0	17
10_1	16
10_0	15
9_3	14
9_2	14
9_1	14

Values for BB field (WDDM 1.1 and earlier):

DDI version	BB value
D3D11-DDI on Feature Level 11_0	17
D3D11-DDI on Feature Level 10	16
D3D10-DDI	15
D3D9 DDI	14

Examples

There is no requirement to pad numbers with leading zeros, i.e. 123 does not need to be represented as 00123 for the CCCCC or DDDDD fields. In previous versions of the Windows OS the last two fields were 4 digits, i.e. CCCC.DDDD. Therefore, the examples for driver versions prior to Windows 10 and WDDM 2.0 only have 4 digits.

Windows Vista WDDM 1.0:

• D3D9 DDI drivers can use 7.14.0000.0000 to 7.14.9999.9999
• D3D10 DDI drivers can use 7.15.0000.0000 to 7.15.9999.9999

Windows 7 WDDM 1.1:

• D3D9 DDI drivers can use 8.14.0000.0000 to 8.14.9999.9999
• D3D10 DDI drivers can use 8.15.0000.0000 to 8.15.9999.9999
• D3D11 DDI with FL_10_0 drivers can use 8.16.0000.0000 to 8.16.9999.9999
• D3D11 DDI with FL_11_0 drivers can use 8.17.0000.0000 to 8.17.9999.9999

Windows 8 WDDM 1.2:

• FL_10_0 HW can use 9.15.0000.0000 to 9.15.9999.9999
• FL_10_1 HW can use 9.16.0000.0000 to 9.16.9999.9999
• FL_11_0 HW can use 9.17.0000.0000 to 9.17.9999.9999
• FL_11_1 HW can use 9.18.0000.0000 to 9.18.9999.9999

Windows 8.1 WDDM 1.3:

• FL_10_0 HW can use 10.15.0000.0000 to 10.15.9999.9999
• FL_10_1 HW can use 10.16.0000.0000 to 10.16.9999.9999
• FL_11_0 HW can use 10.17.0000.0000 to 10.17.9999.9999
• FL_11_1 HW can use 10.18.0000.0000 to 10.18.9999.9999

Windows 10 WDDM 2.0:

• FL_11_1 HW can use 20.18.0000.0000 to 20.18.65535.65535
• FL_12_0 HW can use 20.19.0000.0000 to 20.19.65535.65535
• FL_12_1 HW can use 20.20.0000.0000 to 20.20.65535.65535

Windows 10 WDDM 2.1:

• FL_11_1 HW can use 20.18.0000.0000 to 21.18.65535.65535
• FL_12_0 HW can use 20.19.0000.0000 to 21.19.65535.65535
• FL_12_1 HW can use 20.20.0000.0000 to 21.20.65535.65535

Enforcement

A mandatory test in the HLK certification playlist for Windows 10 builds higher than 10586 will enforce the rules above. The test will be optional for older OS versions. For Windows 10 builds after 10586 the WDDM version has been updated to 2.1. Another way to view this is that the mandatory requirement only applies to drivers that are built for WDDM 2.1 or higher.