Hi,this is not to offend anyone. I only want to learn from someone who really knows.A hundred times I have read the suggestion to completely uninstall all ATI drivers when switching to Nvidia and vice versa.I really would like to know if this is based on any hard facts or just the repetition of a repetition as it makes absolutely no sense to me. While it is always a good thing to keep your system lean there should be zero problems if both drivers coexist. Why in hell would a Nvidia card call for an ATI driver?Want proof? For 3 years now I had a Nvidia PCI card installed next to my ATI which obiviously requires to have both drivers installed. Never did I have any "conflicts" or any problems with this setup although I changed both drivers frequently.Again, this is not to offend anyone or proof anyone wrong but to learn from someone who really knows about OSs and can enlighten me. I'd like to know fundamentally if this is just a widespread, repetitious rumour or if there is any technically founded explanation as to why this might be a problem.Alex

Well it's generally accepted that whhen switching from ATI to Nvidia or vice-versa, keeping the old driver will cause low performance, errors and conflicts. Now that you mention it, I haven't actually seen any direct prrof that this really is the case :-lolI can imagine some games'd get confused over which videocard to use when it finds two drivers, but really, they should be able to tell which card is "active". Also, there's a lot more to drivers now than PCI videocard drivers from several years ago. Nowadays, drivers come with special AGP drivers, background programs, shader replacement code, etc. etc.I always uninstall the old driver anyway. I mean I upgrade my videocard maybe every 1.5-2 years and uninstalling the old driver really doesn't take long - just a few mouse clicks and a reboot. I can live with doing that every two years just do make sure I don't get any problems with thew setup later on. Some things aren't meant to be questioned :)If you're so inclined to find out, why don't you try it next time you upgrade? Just leave the old driver and install the new one to see what happens :)

>If you're so inclined, why don't you try it next time you upgrade? >Just leave the old driver and install the new one to see what >happens :)Well I did that already with no measureable performance loss, but of course unistalled the ATI one later as I like a lean system with not too much unnecessary stuff hanging around.Also as I pointed out I had both brands installed side by side for quite some time. >Some things aren't meant to be questioned Well, I think we should if this is the standard answer to almost every "Help my graphics card does this and that..!", because we are leading people in a wrong direction.Alex

"Well, I think we should if this is the standard answer to almost every "Help my graphics card does this and that..!", because we are leading people in a wrong direction."Good point.I searched the Rage3D forums and here's one post I found:http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php...+nvidia+drivers"i made the mistake of NOT doing this and i got 1/2 the performance i should havemvidia uses their own AGP driver, and when my ATi card tried to use that, it all went to hell!!!"Some even recommend formatting the harddrive when switching:http://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php...+nvidia+drivershttp://www.rage3d.com/board/showthread.php...+nvidia+drivers

Jimmi,I have read through the post and can't help but thinking that this is neither related to the fact that both drivers are installed or a problem of the OS. I think you were on the right path when you speculated that some games are written so bad that they get confused as to which card is active. Like FS which had still the wrong card in its cfg after I installed that new Nvidia card. While it was no problem at all to fix that someone who does not dig in cfg files might come to the conclusion that there is a driver conflict instead. So maybe a reinstall of the game in question should be the more logic suggestion, however a driver uninstall could get things straight. Or of course a complete reinstall of the OS which I find pretty pathetic.Anyway, I feel much better know. :-hah Alex

Hi Alex,For me it's simply a matter of housekeeping. If any registry entries aren't required to make my system run then I don't want them on my system.Back a couple years ago when I changed from nVidia to ATI I recall seeing registry entries for my old nVidia card after installing the ATI (and this was after having been thorough... I thought... in cleaning all the nVidia stuff out before installing the ATI). I didn't have any conflicts between the old and new driver sets, but I saw no reason to have registry entries for the Nvidia after it was removed from the system.I can recall numerous times in this and other forums when folks resolved a problem by doing a thorough cleaning and driver reinstall. Doesn't always fix a problem but it's not a bad place to start. Most important though, when people arrive and describe their problems they rarely give all the details to their problem and what they've already tried to resolve it. So the driver cleaning is the first thing recommeded just so the troubleshooting can be performed on a system that has been scrubbed clean.Cheers,Greg

Agreed. Nice chatting with you guys.Alex

Why? Because conflicting drivers can cause issues that is very hard to troubleshoot :).Of course you may be able to pull it off without a problem. Heck I am sure that the majority will have it working just fine with only using the windows uninstaller. But of course it can cause conflicts if you leave the rests from your old video card behind and install the new ones. If you ever encounter problems with your new card and you didn

>Why? Because conflicting drivers can cause issues that is very hard >to troubleshoot .Yeah, but my question was why they should conflict in the first place...>Defragmentation just help that much.Frankly I think defragging in a time of 10000 rpm drives and 8MB cache is still necessary from time to time but completely overrated. >It can never get close to a clean reformat. Not even if you have >better defrag tools than windows default.Agree.>But for me a reformat is not a big deal really.Well, for me it usually takes a month until I have everything up and runing again with a myriad of addons and a home cockpit with a lot of hadware cfg setings etc..>Now that isn

Because you have things left in the registry and your system may still think you are an ATI owner or vice versa if you have the other video card :) Computers are quite brain dead really. I know several that got trouble with switching from ATI to nVidia for example. But that said it

WinXP seems to be pretty good at taking care of itself. I ran my last install for 10 months and it really didn't slow down that much over time. Win98 would require a format maybe once every 3 months.Will definitely have to format this week when I get a new mobo, CPU and videocard though :( It will take forever to get all aircraft installed and convince all the payware publisher that just because my hardware cfg change I'm not a pirate :-lol

My last mobo change from an nForce1 to an nForce2 board went without the slightest hitch and without a reinstall of the OS.Booted up in Save Mode. Let Windows do its thing, up and running in about 20 minutes. This was like upgrading to a new graphics card from the same vendor. So before I do all the work I would at least try and see what happens.Alex

Try the same going from nVidia chipsets to VIA chipsets ;)You don

I believe that a standard uninstall of ATI drivers prior to installing an Nvidia card (or the other way around) should suffice....you can do a full registry check if you so desire, but it really isn't necessary. There's no way that an Nvidia card is going to try to access an ATI driver 'by mistake', nor vica-versa; the hardware is just too different. They may ultimately being trying to DO the same things on screen, but at a deeper hardware level, they arre poles apart...the way that ATI uses shaders, and various buffers is different, and as such it will be looking for ATI specific instructions, and .dll files...it would never accidentaly try to read an NV4***.dll for example...it wouldn't even know what it was, let alone try to translate it!! Plus of course, Windows will register an ATI card and tie it to the relavent installed ATI driver (and of course, vica-versa for Nvidia) so the card will only 'see' and respond to the pertinent driver.In the interests of good registry houskeeping, then it is worth tracking down and removing all the old entries relavent to the card that has been replaced, but even so, it really shouldn't cause any performance problems.Having replaced the card with a different brand, I would always recommend reinstalling motherboard drivers, and Direct X, so that they will then tie-in correctly with the new card and drivers. This should then be fine, and Windows shouldn't have any problems. Games may need to have their .cfg files re-written/edited to reflect the new card, in order that they don't carry on looking for something that no longer exists and cause a problem.Overall, I think that the idea of Windows mistaking Nvidia with ATI is basically the same as mistaking your printer for your joystick....it's just not going to happen.At least, having said all that....I've never had it happen to me!! Delete the old drivers, yes...so that Windows doesn't still think that there's another card installed, but the use of those so called driver killers/registry hacking, is unnecessary unless you really want to clean house!!

Makes perfect sense to me and is exactly what I tried to imply with my post.Alex