Depends on what support the OS has.
E.g., it was pretty common in the Win9x days to see a few "Other (?)" devices listed in Device Manager. These would end up being things like PCI/ISA bridges, USB controllers, power management controllers, etc. This happened a lot less by the release of XP.
Things like IDE controllers would normally work fine using standard ATA drivers, and video would work OK despite not having the hot-rod AGP drivers. You might get more performance using the optimized drivers, or maybe not. Once SATA happened, you needed drivers if you wanted to run outside of legacy (IDE compatibility) mode.
I would usually grab an Intel chipset INF package of the latest vintage appropriate for that platform, and not worry so much about where exactly it came from. You can get it from Intel's website (or you could, anyway, before they got blackout drunk and forgot the 90s-2015 ever happened), another motherboard support site / CD, or any old driver library. Same goes for the VIA drivers. Board-specific stuff, like RAID controllers, Ethernet, audio ... you kinda have to go on a case-by-case basis, but that's not what you were asking about anyway.