NVIDIA Revisions

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### Chapter 12. Graphics Drivers - NVIDIA

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# NVIDIA Revisions

NVIDIA occasionally releases new major revisions/branches for their drivers. Typically, these new revisions don't cause major issues, but there are some revisions in which the developers stop supporting older GPUs. This means that older cards can't run from newer revisions.

Luckily, the older major revisions are still hosted online and are occasionally updated to provide some minor bugfixes. This does typically rule out improved compatibility with some APIs, namely windowing systems such as Wayland.

To provide more compatibility with older and newer GPUs, this book provides separate pages for installing different major revisions of NVIDIA and CUDA.

This chapter is laid out so you install some basic NVIDIA software first that is used by all the NVIDIA major revisions before you install revision-specific packages.

That leads to an important decision, however: what major revision should be installed? If your GPU is supported by the latest major revision, you should install it in almost all cases. If your GPU isn't, you will have to find the latest revision that does. If you have a collection of GPUs, both old and new, you'll want to use a revision that supports the older GPU, then see if that revision also supports the newer GPU.

Below covers each major revision in the book and what GPU families they support:

- Current (r590)

  - Blackwell (RTX 50xx)

  - Ada Lovelace (RTX 40xx)

  - Ampere (RTX 30xx)

  - Turing (T-series and GTX 16xx/20xx)

- r580

  - Blackwell (RTX 50xx)

  - Ada Lovelace (RTX 40xx)

  - Ampere (RTX 30xx)

  - Turing (T-series and GTX 16xx/20xx)

  - Volta (V100/TITAN V)

  - Pascal (GTX 10xx)

  - Maxwell (GTX 9xx)

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