Me personally and dozens or maybe even hundreds of thousands of people have the same issue: they are already have last GPU drivers from laptop manufacturer but Illustrator says that "Software drivers of one or more cards are not up-to-date. To use GPU performance, update the software drivers to the latest version, and then restart Illustrator".
Why this is happens?
Simple:
Illustrator tries to check is user have the last GPU driver by comparing drivers versions: version of installed driver with version of the last generic driver available online.
But. Laptops are like mobile phones: manufacturer modifies generic drivers provided by Intel, nVidia, AMD to be compatible with custom hardware of specific laptop model. In the result, last versions of generic drivers just are not compatible and can't be installed on the laptop.
Thanks to butz for info: Re: When I start illustrator, I get a message that my graphics card drivers are not up to date.
A possible solutions of the problem:
- Simple: Illustrator should not check drivers. And just run without any tests. That's all. Simple. But it can be used only as a fast fix for a no more than for a couple of weeks.
- Good: Illustrator should use good well-known practice of software industry. It shouldn't try to check versions of the drivers. It should test for the presence of the required feature itself. And then use available features.
To be more convincing for non-technical professionals I quote from the MSDN (official Microsoft Developers Network Portal):"Identifying the current operating system is usually not the best way to determine whether a particular operating system feature is present. This is because the operating system may have had new features added in a redistributable DLL. Rather than using the Version API Helper functions to determine the operating system platform or version number, test for the presence of the feature itself." Operating System Version (Windows)
A list of some open topics on this subject:
- When I start illustrator, I get a message that my graphics card drivers are not up to date.
Created: 08.07.2015 12:34
Views as on December 13, 2015: 7915
State: not resolved - GPU Acceleration disabled since today with the 2015.2 update
Created: 01.12.2015 16:45
Views as on December 13, 2015: 456
State: not resolved - Illustrator GPU acceleration not working
Created: 12.12.2015 2:47
Views as on December 13, 2015: 76
State: not resolved - Illustrator Issues after the adobe updates
Created: 08.12.2015 17:05
Views as on December 13, 2015: 133
State: not resolved - GPU Acceleration don't activate
Created: 21.10.2015
Views as on December 13, 2015: 64
State: not resolved