NVIDIA Corporation is an American technology company that develops graphics cards, processors and systems-on-a-chip (SoC) and how to update Nvidia drivers is not too hard. NVIDIA’s developments have spread to the video games, professional visualization, high-performance computing and automotive industries, where NVIDIA on-board computers are used as the basis for self-driving cars. The artificial intelligence (AI) market is also an important priority for the company. Now take a look at their line-up
NV 1
It is the first 3D graphics accelerator from NVIDIA, released in 1995. A notable feature of this card is both in an unusual approach with 3D rendering, when Quadratic Texture Maps were used, instead of polygons that are usual now, and in the presence of a microcircuit responsible for sound processing.
Riva 128 / 128ZX
In 1997, the company released the second graphics chip based on the 350-nm process technology, which was awarded the title of “national”.
In 1998, Riva TNT was released – a combined 2D / 3D accelerator.
Riva TNT2
In early 1999, NVIDIA launched the fifth generation GPU.
GeForce 256
in the same 1999, the first GPU from the GeForce line appeared.
Likewise this Now we have the latest GeForce RTX 3090 of this line-up series in 2021. Nvidia has been a leader in graphics development since the 1990s. Their products are popular with gamers, graphic designers, and other artists who need serious graphics performance. This article will walk you through how to make sure your Nvidia GPU is running at its maximum performance by updating your drivers.
What is the Nvidia graphics driver?
A driver is a small piece of software that establishes a connection between your computer and its components or external devices. They tell the computer how to manage these cards. When this happens, the graphics driver ensures that your computer can control the Nvidia graphics processor, known as a graphics card or video card.
Each GPU model has its own driver, which can be found on the Nvidia website. Drivers are updated regularly and it is recommended that you always use the latest.
Why do you need an updated graphics driver?
To update or not to update the drivers for the “video” is an interesting and controversial question. After all, different categories of users will give different answers to it.
The office worker will say, “Drivers? What drivers? “Indeed, if you work in Microsoft Word, balance in 1C, or write code in Visual Studio, you can use outdated drivers for years without sacrificing performance. The update will most likely not provide any noticeable improvements.
But gamers will argue hotly: “Drivers need to be updated regularly!” And this is true. After all, video card manufacturers are constantly optimizing their products for the requirements of various games, and updating the driver can seriously add FPS. In especially difficult cases, the game simply will not start without fresh drivers.
So to update or not to update the drivers for the video card depends on what you are using the computer for. If you need high-performance graphics, you definitely need to update.
Outdated drivers can cause the following problems:
- GeForce Experience not working
- App or game crash
- Nvidia case with high processor
- GeForce error code 0x0003
- Screen freeze
- Nvidia control panel not opening
- suboptimal graphic representation
Methods to update Nvidia graphics drivers
1.) Download manual from Nvidia website
- Check your NVIDIA graphics driver model. You can find it by typing device manager in the search bar.
- Open Device Manager
- Select a graphics card.
- Display adapter
- You will see your GPU in the drop-down menu.
- Graphics card type displayed
- Visit NVIDIA’s official download website. You have to choose the right product type, product line, production model, and operating system. Click the Search button.
- Look for drivers on nvidia website
- Click the Download button.
- Download driver from nvidia site
- When the browser asks if you want to start or save the file, select Save. This ensures that files are not stored in a temporary folder and remain accessible while the driver is being installed.
- Right-click on the downloaded .exe file and select Run as administrator.
- Run the driver exe file as administrator
2.) How to update Nvidia drivers through Automatic update
- Click Start > Settings and select Update & Security.
- Windows Settings
- Click Check for Updates.
- Windows is checking for updates
- This will prompt Windows to check for updates and all graphics drivers will also be updated.
3.) From device manager
- Type “Device Manager” in the search bar and open Device Manager.
- Open Windows Device Manager
- In Device Manager, double-click Graphics Card, and then double-click the device name with NVIDIA Graphics Driver. In my case I have AMD Radeon and in your case its Nvidia. processor is same in both the cards.
- Windows Device Manager
- Choosing a graphics card
- Mouse click on the Driver button option, and then click Update Driver.
- Select the Driver tab
- When asked how to find driver software, click automatically check for updated driver software.
- Automatic search for updated drivers
- Windows searches for and, if necessary, installs new drivers.
4.) How to update Nvidia drivers via Nvidia control panel
- Nvidia Control Panel is a software program built to manage Nvidia devices.
- Click Start > Settings then select Nvidia Control Panel from the list.
- Open Nvidia control panel
- If you have a GeForce or ION GPU, you can also click the Nvidia Update icon in the Windows system tray.
- Find the Help tab.
- Select update.
- In the Settings section you can choose whether you want automatic or manual updates, as well as check for driver updates.
5.) Using the GeForce Experience
- GeForce Experience is companion software program that primarily caters to gamers and allows them to take screenshots and record their gameplay easily.
- Open NVIDIA GeForce Experience.
- Navigate to the Driver tab.
- Select the Reinstall Driver option and select Express Install.
- GeForce Experience driver update
- Follow the on-screen instructions to complete the reinstallation.
By using the methods above, we can easily update Nvidia drivers with the GeForce Experience application installed on the computer. We can install this software independently if you download it from the official website or from the driver we download manually.
After downloading and installing it, we need to create an account on the platform to access the available features. The most important are the game optimization functions, the game bar for screen recording and image capture, as well as the system for automatic driver updates.
Well, once we have access to the options, we have the controller options in the top corner. In this section we will have access to the system to update Nvidia drivers automatically. Anyway, the app itself notifies us when an update is available.
If we want to check whether we have the latest drivers, we just click Check for Updates.
If so, we will give our consent to download the latest version available and then ask ourselves if we want to do a quick install or a custom install. Let’s see what options each of them gives us:
Quick installation
In this mode, the drivers are updated automatically, which in turn performs a standard removal of the previous drivers. We weren’t asked for any options, so standard features were installed.
Custom installation
We recommend the second option for those who are more curious and want to know what to install on their computer. Here are 5 options, but they may differ depending on your graphics card.
Card drivers are mandatory and optional (if necessary) for the PhysX system we are talking about and two more:
Audio controller: For those who don’t know: An HDMI or DisplayPort connection digitally transmits audio and video to the monitor so that sound can be heard through the built-in speakers. If we haven’t installed this extension, it won’t be possible.
USBC Driver: This case is a little more specific and it will be useful for graphics cards that implement a USB Type-C port, such as the Nvidia RTX 2060.
But perhaps the most important option is the last one, which we also recommend enabling. To perform a successful installation, the existing drivers must be completely removed.
It honestly doesn’t get rid of it 100%, but it does approach it and this way we can fix any possible graphics card damage, for example due to bad configuration or wrong installation. You’ll be surprised that your card performs much better with this new driver than the previous one, and part of the fault is enabling this option.
If we are happy with the selected option, we will update the Nvidia driver by clicking Install.
Update Nvidia driver manually step by step
The next way to update is to do the process manually if GeForce Experience has not been installed. But we also went step further and used apps like Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU).
Download the correct driver
The first step we will take is to download the driver for our graphics card. It would be very easy to go to the Nvidia drivers section and fill in the different fields:
Product Type: If we have a graphics card for a general purpose desktop or laptop, it’s almost certainly a GeForce. Unless we are professionals or designers and don’t have Nvidia Quadro or Nvidia TITAN graphics processors.
Product series: This series mainly contains different families belonging to the above specifications. Here we have to be careful to choose our series correctly, depending on whether we are using a laptop (notebook) or on a desktop computer (the rest).
Family: In the next option we finally found our specific model and we really have everything there is so far. So, if you can’t find your specific model, it means you didn’t select the correct series in the previous option.
Operating System: It’s no big secret, but Nvidia has recently improved driver support for almost all operating systems on the market including Linux, Solaris, etc. In the case of Windows 8.1, we will try to download drivers for Windows 10.
Download Type: This point is important because Game Ready (GRD) drivers are designed for maximum game compatibility, whereas Studio Controller (SD) are designed for developers and add other non-game oriented features.
For some time now, Nvidia has also changed the driver download packages and bundled them in a single version (DCH) to ensure maximum compatibility with each version of Windows.
It’s also useful to know what the WHQL extension means, what the quality lab means for Windows hardware. We should always download this version as it has been tested to suggest the correct operation of the installation platform. During beta release it may contain bugs and issues.
Uninstalling Drivers Using DDU (Recommended)
We’ve downloaded the drivers but haven’t installed them as we used a third party app to remove the current one, doing a completely clean update from scratch.
DDU is a free and completely reliable application that is widely used by the gaming community when they discover something is wrong with their graphics card. We will download it from the official site which is none other than Guru3D.
What we get when downloading is a compressed zip file; we don’t need software like WinRAR because Windows can read these files. We right-click on it and select Get All … In the pop-up window we select Get to create a folder in the main directory with the contents of the tablet.
We access the folder and find a new compressed executable file. We will directly double-click to extract the contents into the same folder. In order for no one to run into problems, we recommend that you install a program like 7-Zip or WinRAR to unzip these file types.
Once the job is done, we will have a new folder with more content. We need to run a file called Display Driver Uninstaller. It doesn’t require any installation.
This will be the kind of program we have opened, very simple and with some elements in English and others in Spanish. The pop-up at the beginning gives us certain security warnings and that we are responsible for what we do.
Once you accept the terms, a new window opens in front of us with pretty solid options. As you can see, it is useful not only for updating Nvidia drivers but also for AMD or Intel as it is compatible with hardware from three manufacturers.
We focused on Nvidia’s own options, and we’ve enabled all but PhysX. We can also choose this to remove everything in our path or disable what we want. For example, GeForce Experience doesn’t affect Nvidia driver failure, so we can disable it and save the software.
For our part, we will delete everything to reinstall everything. Do what you think is best.
Finally, a new window tells us that we will restart the system in Safe Mode for further security and cleaning. Why? Because in safe mode expansion cards and peripheral drivers are not loaded into the system. We will continue without using Safe Mode.
Well, now we have to choose first whether we want to remove the controls for the audio or graphics processor, and the two brands of graphics cards we have,
Then we click on the first option which is “clean and restart” as this will delete the files and everything loaded into memory completely. We don’t have to worry, nothing bad will happen in the system so we can continue without fear.
Due to the lack of a graphics card, your current monitor will inevitably have a poor display with a lower resolution. This will be fixed soon.
Install the new NVIDIA driver
- After this procedure, which is not yet mandatory, we can now update or reinstall the Nvidia drivers.
- Without further delay, we launch the installer and retrieve the content where it has been determined or where we think it is appropriate if we want to remove the rest of the content later.
- After this process, the installation wizard opens, where we can choose between installing drivers only or drivers + GeForce Experience.
- As we expected, it is included in the installer, so in our case we will choose the first option.
- The next step will sound to us with this quick or custom installation option which allows us to choose between the same options we had during the process with GeForce Experience.
- When we have removed the DDU driver, we will select all components to install and leave the correct installation option disabled.
- Then the process of updating Nvidia drivers will start and we will update our card and make it fully functional.
Conclusion
Well, we’ve looked at all the ways to update the drivers on our Nvidia cards. You have several options or paths to choose from, both are very simple and all options are explained in detail so you don’t miss anything. If you like this article please share this on social media. One share gives 1 million blessings to you. Thankyou so much for your valuable time.
