Hi all,
Graphics card drivers are a bit of a problem both for Construct 2 and HTML5 in general. In Construct 2 old drivers can cause crashes and glitches. For HTML5 in general, many ordinary users have out of date drivers, and this causes their browser to revert to software rendering making the game run slowly for them. If they updated their driver the browser might enable hardware acceleration then the game would run super fast... but most people probably have no idea how to do that. I reckon this is the #1 problem with HTML5 performance on desktop.
So I've done a little side-project to create a tool called the Graphics Driver Updater. This is a really simple program that tells you what your graphics card is, how old the driver is, and gives you a relevant link to go update it. It's designed for non-technical general users so it has a little bit of explanation and is meant to be as straightforward as possible.
Here it is:
<font size="5">Download the Graphics Driver Updater (beta 2)</font>
(last update: 25th February 2012)
Could you all give it a spin and let me know how it works for you? I'd love to get feedback on if you think it's clear, simple and straightforward. It should also accurately detect your graphics card and the driver date, but let me know if anything seems amiss. Also if detection fails you'll see a "Sorry!" message - would be interesting to know what your setup is in that case.
Also I haven't tested on XP so would be reassuring if someone on XP could give me the thumbs up it works.
If it all goes smoothly, I'd like to release this as an open-source general purpose tool. Any games or apps that need up to date graphics card drivers could use it. Also, if people complain to you about your HTML5 games being slow, you can send them to this tool so they can easily update their drivers, which is the most likely thing to make HTML5 games go faster. It's probably much better than trying to get an ordinary user to figure out what their graphics card is.
The situation with graphics card drivers is total shambles. Many are poorly engineered or simply broken and many manufacturers do nothing to help people update them. It's been a huge pain in the ass while developing Construct 2 and will surely cause more problems in future for other people, especially in HTML5 performance, so I hope this tool can help make life easier for some others out there, because the people responsible for graphics drivers are not doing great IMO.