Basic question

Whach

Whach

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Dec 22, 2011
Messages
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I'm going to replace my 680's with 980's and just wanted to know if it's possible to just do a straight swap without uninstalling the drivers. Or do I have to do the whole driver merry-go-round? Thanks for any info.
 
Old drivers won't recognize the video card, since it wasn't a thing when the drivers were built. You have to use new drivers to properly support the new video card. 344.11 is the first public version of the driver that supports 980/970. Latest driver right now is 344.16 for 970/980.

Uninstall drivers, use DDU to clean out old drivers, install new drivers, and you'll have a happy gaming experience. Do it right, and you'll have a happy gaming experience.

tldr

Basic Answer - You have to do the driver merry-go round else your shiny new card is just a paper weight.
 
Are you so impatient you can't take the 2 mins to re-install the driver package? :D
 
Brent_Justice said:
Old drivers won't recognize the video card, since it wasn't a thing when the drivers were built. You have to use new drivers to properly support the new video card. 344.11 is the first public version of the driver that supports 980/970. Latest driver right now is 344.16 for 970/980.

Uninstall drivers, use DDU to clean out old drivers, install new drivers, and you'll have a happy gaming experience. Do it right, and you'll have a happy gaming experience.

tldr

Basic Answer - You have to do the driver merry-go round else your shiny new card is just a paper weight.
Click to expand...

Even if I have the latest drivers installed? I do a clean install anyway, just thought it could have been a shortcut as it was the same driver "package". Clean install it is then.
 
The question is valid though: assuming you have the latest driver installed, and the card you want to install is recognized by said driver, why would you still need to go through the hoops?

Not that it's much work, but I'm really curious.
 
For the most part, it does work. I remember swapping out 2 660Tis and 3 different 780s while on the same installed driver, and the only bugs I ran into were the occasional inability to enable bezel correction for surround, and some incorrect readings in MSI Afterburner when trying to OC. Haven't tried it again or with newer cards/drivers (not to mention I'm on a different mobo/CPU now), but either way, I'd also recommend doing it right the first time just to avoid any potential issues.
 
n=1 said:
The question is valid though: assuming you have the latest driver installed, and the card you want to install is recognized by said driver, why would you still need to go through the hoops?

Not that it's much work, but I'm really curious.
Click to expand...
Because it's a different piece of hardware, and Windows will throw a fit regardless if the drivers are okay with it.
 
Whach said:
Even if I have the latest drivers installed? I do a clean install anyway, just thought it could have been a shortcut as it was the same driver "package". Clean install it is then.
Click to expand...

You don't *have* to do a full DDU cleanout or anything, but I would highly recommend a "clean install" through the nvidia driver installer. To make it quick just have the driver downloaded, extract it, and place a shortcut to the setup.exe on your desktop :p. Total time will be 3-4 minutes and it will ensure you don't have any weird glitches :). You'll want the 344.16 WHQL driver set (newest version) for the GTX 900 series cards at this time.
 
Interesting. I've never changed drivers when changing hardware unless there was a newer driver. Have an older rig with a gtx570. Added an 8800gts640mb for two extra screens and never updated the driver. Did have some unexpected behaviour in some instances, screen flickering or going completely black for 10-20 seconds. Time to reinstall the drivers and see if it helps.
 
Bigc208 said:
Interesting. I've never changed drivers when changing hardware unless there was a newer driver. Have an older rig with a gtx570. Added an 8800gts640mb for two extra screens and never updated the driver. Did have some unexpected behaviour in some instances, screen flickering or going completely black for 10-20 seconds. Time to reinstall the drivers and see if it helps.
Click to expand...
This happened when I just tried installing my GTX 570 with my 780 to test dedicated PhysX without a clean driver install. I instantly knew why and thought "Welp, that was expected..." :p
 
Armenius said:
Because it's a different piece of hardware, and Windows will throw a fit regardless if the drivers are okay with it.
Click to expand...

That makes sense, but I just find it weird that certain hardware like CPU, memory, storage and optical drives you can freely swap in and out without Windows throwing a fit. Then again they don't exactly have drivers that are 300+MB in size.
 
BTW it's completely irrevelant if you uninstall the drivers or not, but you still have to install new drivers after fitting the new cards.

You can't even swap a card to one of the same kind without installing drivers. HW ids and such.
 
So you're saying it's ok to not uninstall the drivers, but if you do a clean install of new drivers that'd be ok?
 
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