If someone were to write code to their software fixing bugs, how and why can that break other code/features if it’s not meant for that? A common example are Nvidia drivers “breaking” or Microsoft patching one feature but breaking many, many other features.
If code is meant to be hyper specific, how can it affect any other feature?
Your example is for graphics drivers, which are unbelievably complex, not to mention have to be designed to:
A) work in tandem with a crazy amount of different architectures, kernels, hardware setups and dependencies.
B) must reliably manage the demands of millions of complex calculations, monitor throughput and heat dissipation, handle complex and varying game configurations and technologies, all while simultaneously working as seamlessly as possible for us users.
The breaking could be from any one of the above systems and more having any number is issues or changes.
Simplified example: Function #185 requires specific feedback from system hardware output #768, but that output was updated by the another development team for another system driver to give the word “true” or “false” instead of a number indicating the same. Now, if that function is not designed to handle the change gracefully beforehand, then there is a problem. Hour severe the problem is depends on what subsystem of the driver software is affected.
Monitoring system? Maybe not a biggie, the graphing app gets killed or freezes. The actual driver gets the issue? Could be catastrophic failure, where the system freezes or restarts, or corrupts the driver install itself and you need to reinstall previous version. Worse case scenario, it really fails and fries hardware, but that’s rare. Failsafes usually kick in on the hardware side to mitigate that kind of damage.
Now times this by a probable factor of thousands of functions and hundreds of dependencies and you get the idea.
I’m not great at explaining things sometimes, so forgive me if the above doesn’t answer your question.