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Switching AMD ---> Nvidia, reformat?

A

Arch

Gawd
Joined
Mar 9, 2000
Messages
822
I'm going to be swapping my AMD 7870 for an Nvidia 670 in the coming weeks. In years gone by, switching from AMD/ATI to Nvidia or visa versa required a reformat if you wanted things to work correctly. Is that still required today? I suspect not as I've seen people with both AMD and Nvidia cards installed at the same time (one for graphics and one for physx). I'd rather not reformat if I don't have to, but I will if its going to prevent drivers incompatibilities.
 
Umm, no. A full reformat just to install a new graphics card hasn't been required in a LONG time (I've never had to do that and I've been DIYing PCs since the early 90s). Just uninstall the old drivers, and perhaps use Driver Sweeper to clean up the left overs, before dropping in the new card.
 
A new driver install will replace any existing files. If there are leftover files, there is no way the new video card will call for them. The files will just sit there and do nothing. An AMD card will not ask for Nvidia driver files just because they happen to be there.
 
I would fully uninstall the AMD drivers through the control panel as well. I recently made the switch from AMD to NVIDIA on Win 7 64-bit without any issues.

The new NVIDIA drivers have a "clean install" feature if you are worried about any old overlapping files.

So no, you don't need to ditch your current OS to change video cards. Good luck.
 
If I recall correctly, try the newest ATIMAN Uninstaller to really clean out those AMD drivers. I've heard from some who think it better than driver sweeper. It worked for me when I had AMD driver foulups that made it impossible to install any more DirectCompute/Physics stuff . All the other components would be fine, but I'd just get a log error that it was unable to install physics stuff. When I cleaned out with ATIMAN, it fixed the issue.

I have always used one of the driver cleaning programs when either problems come up or when going between AMD and Nvidia on the same Windows install. You should be fine without a reformat.
 
As Nocens said, there's no point in cleaning between vendor swaps. Unless you're particularly pressed for space, you don't even need to uninstall the old drivers. Just disable the CCC from starting up and you're good to go.

Driver cleaning these days is basically akin to doing a rain dance. Probably won't hurt, but it's not going to make it rain.
 
The drivers don't have problems with each other under Windows 7. I've run both side by side with Nvidia and AMD cards in the same machine with no problems (gaming AMD card and folding on several Nvidia). Just uninstall it normally to keep the CCC from popping up and telling you there is no supported hardware.
 
Download latest nvidia drivers.
Go to Control Panel.
Uninstall the AMD CAPs
Uninstall the AMD Drivers using the uninstall utility.
( if you want to run a cleaner utility you could do so.....I do use DriverCleaner.net in these cases)

You will be prompted to restart.
Do so.

Shut down and install your spanky new 670.

Boot up and install the nvidia drivers.:D
 
Thanks all for the input! I suspected this was the case but I wanted to make sure.
 
Definitely not needed unless you're running Win95-ME :D, would be quite funny though if you came back and said you had to reformat after the swap though.
 
No need to reformat. Just uninstall them and use drive sweeping program for a piece of mind.
 
My EVGA 670 FTW should be here today. I'm going to try just swapping the cards and loading the drivers without uninstalling anything first. If that works I'll just roll with it.
 
Arch said:
My EVGA 670 FTW should be here today. I'm going to try just swapping the cards and loading the drivers without uninstalling anything first. If that works I'll just roll with it.
Click to expand...


I bet it works fine. All except for Windows Vista, I have run AMD/ATI cards along side NVIDIA cards to do multiple monitor setups for years and years now. And Windows 7 is far more forgiving than any other operating system in regards to drivers.

Good luck and congrats on the upgrade!
 
I can share with all of you a very fast solution that is 1000% guaranteed to work.

Acronis True Image Home 2012

It's cheap and solves the problem of driver issues.

I've got video card driver removal down to a fine science. Every location, every file and every registry entry. Yet, after everything is manually cleaned out, I still have weird quirks that, either imagined or real, still gives me issues. I almost always just end up doing a clean install.

But, I got tired of that about a year ago and started using Acronis True Image.

Simply do your install of whatever OS flavor you like. Update all your drivers EXCEPT your video card driver. Load up your favorite apps, etc. Do all your regedit tweaks like turn caps into shift, firewall add via context menu, faster reboot, open with notepad via context menu, take ownership etc. Update Windows and last but not least, run a Windows cleaner app to clean up loose files and registry errors.

Hint: Use ninite.com to quickly add all your favorite Windows applications.

Hint: Even though you do not have a video card driver loaded, you can still change the resolution to 1080p or to the highest resolution your monitor supports.

Once all of that is done. Reboot and allow Acronis True Image to load up. Once the application loads up, you are presented with a very easy to follow GUI. From there, create a backup *.TIB file. You can save it to any drive attached to your computer. I use a fast external USB hard-drive.

Here is the fun part. When a new video card driver comes out, simply load up Acronis and do a restore of your saved partition. It literally takes 5 minutes to do this on average. Your restore will of course have all your apps, tweaks, updates, etc etc minus a video card driver installed.

This method takes less time almost as trying to remove any old drivers.

And before some of you cry foul, no good, won't work because you will have to go back and reinstall all your games. Well, no you don't. I am willing to bet many of you out there do not know you can turn any game, any app into a "portable" version and can simply side load it in a matter of seconds from an external source or different partition internally.

There are many many guides out there on how to do this. But, here is a great starting point, http://www.cameyo.com/

From someone who loves the HardOCP community and helping where I can, I would strongly encourage everyone to at least consider my guide. It's a fantastic solution, extremely fast and 100% effective. Not only for video card driver woes but virtually any other issue you have where you need a fresh install complete with everything you need and like in a pinch.
 
I don't doubt that it's 100% effective, but it seems like an enormous amount of work and complexity to solve an issue that Microsoft has already (plus, Acronis isn't free, so there's a real quantifiable cost there). The GDDM is designed to eliminate the kinds of issues we dealt with in the XP days that necessitated driver cleaning, and in my experience, it works spectacularly well.
 
Lol. Much ado about nothing. Uninstall AMD drivers pull card out put nVidia card in and install nVidia drivers. You don't need to format you don't need acronis, and you don't need to waste your time.
 
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