[HackingWizard]

Driver update depends on your OEM. Both ARM and Qualcomm send driver updates for their premium and upper highend Socs. The support reaching your phone is on the OEM. Google has started to push direct GPU driver updates starting with Pixel 10. So, hopefully others may follow too.

[robotnikman]

Usually GPU vendors (Nvidia, Intel, AMD) provide a way to download and install drivers manually (on Windows), including specific versions or older versions. Qualcomm is an outlier in this case.

[CopperWing]

No more: https://www.qualcomm.com/developer/blog/2025/05/introducing-...

[pjmlp]

Note that those drivers usually only work well in desktops, on laptops the GPU might have gone through OEM adaptations on the motherboard integration, and a driver from GPU vendors might have issues.

A common example is overheating, because the way the OEM has done their device isn't a setup that the driver knows about.

Which is why on laptops, the drivers if available have to be from the OEM themselves.

[wtallis]

It might be more fair to say that there's simply no standard way to do power management for discrete GPUs in a laptop, or to integrate such power management with Windows and whatever power management it's trying to do. And the lack of a clear "right" way to do things means laptop OEMs use this area for product differentiation with their own shitty special sauce software and firmware hacks.

If installing drivers that come directly from NVIDIA onto a laptop can cause that laptop's GPU to overheat in the sense of getting so hot it fails to function properly or has degraded reliability, that's entirely NVIDIA's fault. If by "overheating" you just mean drawing more power and causing the fans to get louder than they would in an out of the box configuration, the blame for that should be shared between NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the laptop OEM, but you shouldn't blame the user for doing something that should work and would work if those three vendors could cooperate.