Do I need to remove & reinstall drivers if swapping a Nvidia card to a different Nvidia card?

[DrZepto]

This is probably such a noob question but seriously, would I need to remove drivers and reinstall them once I've replaced my old Nvidia gpu with a newer Nvidia gpu? Only asking because I've never had to do this and I haven't seen much mentioned about it on here or through Linus' channel.

Thanks in advance.

 

[kccp]

Yes, you would want to uninstall all old drivers before installing your new graphics card.

 

[Wolfshadw]

Depends on what the two cards are. If both cards are covered by the same driver package, then you shouldn't need to uninstall/reinstall them.

-Wolf sends

 

[xRatspike]

Typically, yes. Usually it depends but I always fresh install my drivers for a new GPU as to not run into any problems.

 

[Solandri]

You probably don't need to uninstall and reinstall, but I would do so anyway. When you make one of these universal installers, it's usually done by looking up the hardware, then installing a bunch of stuff and setting various configuration settings based on the hardware. e.g. video card model F431H supports features w, x, and y, but not z. So turn on w, x, y, but leave z off.

There's usually a software emulation backup layer as well, to cover for missing features in certain cards. So the new card will still work with the old drivers, but it may be doing certain operations in software instead of with hardware on the new card, because your old card lacked that hardware and your drivers are set up not to even try to use that hardware and use software emulation instead.

 

[coozie7]

It's usually best to uninstall the old drivers and install the latest WHQL software when changing cards, especially if you're doing a big upgrade or you haven't updated the drivers for a while.
Download and SAVE-don't install yet-the latest WHQL drivers from the Nvidia website. They'll go into your Downloads folder.
Uninstall the current Nvidia software, all of it, restarting if required.
Once all the old software is uninstalled, power down the system and then swap cards.
Power up the system and install the drivers you saved out earlier.
Restart.
Tweak as required.
Restart again.
Done.