Switching from one Nvidia card to another. Reinstall current drivers?

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Sedriss

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 18, 2004
Messages
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Question guys. Normal whenever I upgrade a GPU is when I actually do a reformat. This time around it's not the case and I'm just swapping cards. Do I need to uninstall/reinstall drivers for the new card even though both cards are Nvidia? Or would it automatically detect the card and be super duper?
 
It should work just fine as is but myself personally I would after I install the card reinstall the drivers.
 
Sedriss said:
Question guys. Normal whenever I upgrade a GPU is when I actually do a reformat. This time around it's not the case and I'm just swapping cards. Do I need to uninstall/reinstall drivers for the new card even though both cards are Nvidia? Or would it automatically detect the card and be super duper?
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Reformatting your drives and reinstalling Windows over a GPU upgrade is ridiculous. It's unnecessary. I will admit there have been times on occasion where people ran into issues with reinstalling drivers over the top of older drivers or upgrading cards even when the unified drivers supported both cards in the past. However, these types of problems are exceedingly rare to almost non-existent today. The modern driver installers are much better about dealing with the upgrade process than they were 10 or 15 years ago.

I've swapped all kinds of hardware without reinstalling the drivers. When graphics cards are involved I tend to benchmark them or run some games to check my performance against online reviews and ensure that I'm not experiencing low performance or anything like that. Its been a long time since I've had to bother with driver cleaners or OS reinstallation over a GPU driver. I talk to people all the time who have stability issues with their systems from incremental driver issues and things like that but I rarely do. Even when I installed one of the more recent piece of shit NVIDIA drivers which sucked ass, all I had to do was reinstall the old one over it and everything went back to normal.
 
Sedriss said:
Question guys. Normal whenever I upgrade a GPU is when I actually do a reformat. This time around it's not the case and I'm just swapping cards. Do I need to uninstall/reinstall drivers for the new card even though both cards are Nvidia? Or would it automatically detect the card and be super duper?
Click to expand...
I would DDU the drivers, shutdown, swap cards, and install the drivers anytime I am changing video cards regardless if they are from the same manufacturer. Only because I attempted to do so once in Windows 8.1 without touching the drivers and I ran into all sorts of issues. I even had issues when simply adding a second card for SLI in Windows 7.
 
Ahh ok. Thank you. Sorry Dan I should have worded myself better. Usually when I upgrade my GPU is when I go about doing a whole system overall as well (CPU,mb,ram). My apologies for not putting that in there. Thank you for the input!! :cool:
 
never reinstalled drivers installing a card from same manufacturer unless they had new drivers available. If I had the latest I left it alone. Never had a single issue, just works.
 
I just went from 2 1080s -> 1 1080 to now a 1 1080 Ti. I reinstalled drivers since DP sound was not recognized by Windows 7. Otherwise, drivers were working just fine.
 
Dan_D said:
Reformatting your drives and reinstalling Windows over a GPU upgrade is ridiculous. It's unnecessary. I will admit there have been times on occasion where people ran into issues with reinstalling drivers over the top of older drivers or upgrading cards even when the unified drivers supported both cards in the past. However, these types of problems are exceedingly rare to almost non-existent today. The modern driver installers are much better about dealing with the upgrade process than they were 10 or 15 years ago.

I've swapped all kinds of hardware without reinstalling the drivers. When graphics cards are involved I tend to benchmark them or run some games to check my performance against online reviews and ensure that I'm not experiencing low performance or anything like that. Its been a long time since I've had to bother with driver cleaners or OS reinstallation over a GPU driver. I talk to people all the time who have stability issues with their systems from incremental driver issues and things like that but I rarely do. Even when I installed one of the more recent piece of shit NVIDIA drivers which sucked ass, all I had to do was reinstall the old one over it and everything went back to normal.
Click to expand...

There IS an exception to the *don't reinstall Windows over GPU upgrades* - and I found that out the hard and recent way - and it has DIRECTLY to do with Windows Store-based games.
UNfortunately, the Windows Store (and ALL the software sold on the Store - including the games) relies on the registry that Windows builds when originally installed. Naturally, major upgrades (such as GPUs and CPUs) play hob with that registry. Fortunately, it ONLY affects the Store, and games sold/distributed via the Store; still, it IS a problem that must be fixed - and without breaking either uptime OR security. (Note that does NOT apply to non-Store-based games.)
 
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