Question about video cards and drivers.

[Azureth]

What's the worst that can happen if you put in a video card that has the wrong drivers for it? Either because it's a different card from the same brand (ie put a GTX 470 in when it has drivers for a GTX 570) or say you have Nvidia drivers on and put in a AMD card.

 

[Dan_D]

What's the worst that can happen if you put in a video card that has the wrong drivers for it? Either because it's a different card from the same brand (ie put a GTX 470 in when it has drivers for a GTX 570) or say you have Nvidia drivers on and put in a AMD card.

If the drivers aren't correct the system will run in a standard video mode and prompt you to install the right drivers. Most AMD and NVIDIA drivers are unified and will automatically re-detect their respective brand of GPU and reinstall themselves properly. You'll be prompted to reboot and you should be done. That's pretty much it. At worst the driver won't work and you'll have to uninstall the old ones and download the right ones. Its really simple and straight forward.

 

[veri745]

Even if you mix AMD and Nvidia, it should default back to the windows drivers. You just need to uninstall and use a driver cleaner, and then install the correct drivers.

Dan is correctly about the unified drivers within a brand though; if you're talking about two (current) nvidia cards, they use the same drivers anyway.

 

[XacTactX]

One time I went from a 4860 using CCC 10.11 to a 9500GT using 260.99 and I forgot to remove the CCC drivers before installing the 9500GT. Until I finished uninstalling and reinstalling drivers, the desktop and all display functions were terribly out-of-sync and sluggish. After restarting, everything was smooth as silk, no ill effects in the long-term.