Do consoles uses Drivers or just basic BIOS?

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The bios is the operating system for the chip. You use the bios to set the parameters for the chip.
Dos or unix is the base operating system of the computer. The windows system you use on your computer, be it linux or Windows sits, on the base operating system.

The console is from the base operating system and whilst disc drives are plug and play there will be drivers that the base operating system will be using. The chip will also be using the bios.

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All consoles use a specialized software stack, usually based on existing software (the Xbox OS is based on NT, the Playstation OS on FreeBSD). This software stack is highly optimized and makes use of the special hardware capabilities of the console - e.g. the Xbox 360 GPU supports a very basic form of surface tesselation, which can be used by games, even though the PC version of Direct3D 9 itself did not have this support.

There's also a lot less hardware abstraction necessary, so while a PC Direct3D draw call may actually go through many layers of software before finally being sent to the GPU, a Direct3D call on the Xbox will directly write to the command buffer. The Playstation 3 graphics library libgcm is really just that, in release builds it's just a bunch of macros that are directly converted into memory writes that go to a command buffer.

Consoles just use the driver support needed to get the hardware into shape, but actually sending commands to the hardware is done by the games and the associated libraries (which are usually linked into the game executable). On the PC however, every draw call to Direct3D will result in a call to the GPU specific user mode Direct3D driver (on Vista and above).

BIOS is one of those topics. The correct term for a piece of software that is stored firmly in the hardware is called firmware. BIOS is the name of certain firmware versions, older Playstation use that name to refer to their firmware but also the ancient and horribly outdated firmware for PC is called BIOS. Even though the next generation of consoles is based on the same hardware as PCs, they usually use custom firmware, not BIOS and probably not UEFI....Show more

Um i believe drivers. Bios or basic input output system is just the foundation and interaction between the components i believe. I'm pretty sure it doesn't have any graphical capabilities. To my knowledge, consoles use very optimized and well developed drivers. I assume you mean graphics drivers....Show more

They use a BIOS.
- Because they're required

They use drivers.
- Because they're required.

They use a custom OS (Operating System).
- To gain better protection over their hardware/software from hackers, as well as allow better implementation of any new features they would like.


A prime example of this is the PS3, which originally allowed you to install a second OS of your choice, but this was later removed after the 3.15 update for fear of hackers having too much access to the PS3's internals....Show more