How to see the specifications of my Graphics Card before installing drivers in Windows 7?

Solution 1:

After trying different ways to install the drivers my opinion is that in order to see the hardware the system needs some kind of software/drivers. Removing all drivers completely makes the hardware inaccessible. In most cases Windows will try to install some minimal generic drivers as soon as it detects their absence. In some cases removing the drivers will make the display unusable (completely black) after reboot (it happened to me twice after removing the Intel drivers from HP; I had to boot in safe mode in order to use the display and install a driver; another solution was to use a rescue disk and from there to go back to a system restore point.)

So, the answer to the question is probably that without some drivers (at least the generic ones that come with the OS installation) there is no access to the hardware.

Also, accessing information on the hardware - its "specifications" - depends on the driver up to some point: using a driver intended for a Radeon (TM) HD 7400M GPU while I had Radeon (TM) HD 6470M displayed the wrong info that my GPU was 7400M. But even so (or, I imagine, with some generic driver) it was possible to see the hardware ID, which led to identifying the hardware (see images in the question and the comments made by and31415).

How To Find Unknown Device Drivers By Their Vendor & Device ID.

I cannot rule out the possibility of seeing some info on the graphics card in BIOS. That BIOS info is also visible in this way.