Upgraded from a GTX 1650 Super to an RTX 2060 Super. Whats the proper way to deal with drivers?

[smmmokin]

I plugged in the new card, everything booted up fine. System recognized it. By chance there was a new driver version through experience that I installed. At no point did it mention anything about removing old drivers and everything seems fine as far as the new card is concerned. Device manager showed the new card with an up to date driver.

 

Makes me wonder if since it's the same brand Nvidia just does it's thing and it works or am I a fool? Haven't upgraded a graphics card in over a decade. I just feel like they have all that figured out by now unless it's a different brand. Then you gotta wipe drivers.

[MadAnt250]

If you checked the clean install option it should uninstall the old the drivers.

[smmmokin]

1 hour ago, MadAnt250 said:

If you checked the clean install option it should uninstall the old the drivers.

Thanks friend. Regardless of what card you are installing the download package is exactly the same size and same version. Everything works fine even without doing that. I've spent a lot of time looking for an official answer tonight but there isn't one. I did the clean install today but it changed nothing. In device manager the driver is exactly the same and performance across several games is identical. Zero performance change even in ray tracing games. It's weird this isn't a question people have and/or is answered. It's 2020 and I only asked because I'm stuck in the past of driver hell when installing cards. But I think Nvidia made it so you can swap out a card every hour and never need to worry about drivers. I'm fucked so won't say I'm 100% right but I'm deathly confident in saying that.

[DarkMatter1975]

I always use Display Driver Uninstaller, that will get rid of every trace of old drivers, it's for both Amd and Nvidia cards.

[martward]

TBH I haven't done a clean install the past 3 GPU upgrades since they were all Nvidia cards. I don't think it's necessary. I guess RTX is just disabled when you have a GPU that doesn't support it, but it just installs the same code whichever card you have.

[Analog]

Usually after each component upgrade that I do reinstall Windows completely. But this time I wanted to check if it actually made any difference. So with my last upgrade I simply put in my 3080 instead of the 1080 I had previously without reinstalling the drivers and ran a couple benchmarks (3D Mark). Then I reinstalled Windows complete and also got the latest drivers. After running the benchmarks again after that I can say there is no difference, all scores within margin of error. To answer your question, reinstall drivers or not when you are not switching manufacturers doesn't seem to make any difference. 

[thewelshbrummie]

To answer the question, just keep them updated and use the latest stable release. The same applies when upgrading from one AMD GPU to another.

 

You can use an Nvidia drivers for any GPU that is supported by that revision. There are usually differences if the OS is different - my old desktop boots XP/Vista/7 and needed different driver versions but for Win 10, since new 32bit drivers aren't made anymore, the one download (currently 460.39) will work on Win 10 for any GPU from a GTX 650 and newer, with only a few exceptions.

 

The only time you need to uninstall drivers is if switching between AMD and Nvidia - upgrading from one card to a newer card from the same company won't make any difference.

 

I guess there might be an issue if you were upgrading from an EOL card but even then just updating the driver would fix that, which right now is 500 series Nvidia cards from 2010 or low end 600 cards like the GTX 610 (i.e. Fermi architecture or older)  Even the 660TI that I sold 5 years ago (a Kepler architecture based card) is still supported and the same driver package works just as well for that card as it does for the RTX 3090