More on the Differences between DD and Miniport
Both the DD and Miniport access the hardware.
The miniport is intended to be paired one-on-one
with a particular variation of video card. As such,
one of the jobs of the miniport is to return video
card configuration information to the display driver.
The number of required functions in the miniport
is low which keeps the miniport code size small.
The required display driver code is more complex
than the miniport code and can work across a
family of video cards. The DD can call functions in
the GDI to return configuration info from the miniport.
EXAMPLE : Matrox Millenneium I & II, Matrox Mystique
The same display driver (Mga64.dll) is used for
all three of these cards. However, there are different
miniports (mga_mil.sys) for each particular card.