• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Moving from GeForce to Radeon

nheather

nheather

nheather

Associate
Joined
19 May 2004
Posts
1,037
Location
Horsham, West Sussex
I currently have a GTX 1660Ti about to be replaced by a RX9060XT and I wonder what is the best procedure for removing and installing drivers.

Should I remove the GeForce drivers and software before I remove the 1660 so that the 9060 goes and clean.

Or do I just remove the 1660, fit the 9060, install the Radeon drivers and then bother about removing the GeForce drivers.

Or does it not matter?
 
Personally, I like doing a clean reinstall, but there are apps that can remove them cleanly, but your mileage may vary, as I've seen it can do with some peoples experiences.
Just backup your steam library and anything you care about onto an external drive and put it back on afterwards, a bit of faf, but you know it's properly fresh and will all work flawlessly :)
 
It's really not something you need to worry about. Maybe over 10 years ago, but not now. You can even leave your nvidia drivers installed, it isn't like Windows will be confused, the AMD card is on generic drivers anyway until you install your own. Would you uninstall a webcam's drivers before installing a new one, or just plug it in and go ham? It's really the same for this, just on a different interface. I've had both nvidia and amd cards in at the same time, both drivers installed, sometimes both cards in, sometimes one card in at a time, no issues at all.
 
Last edited:
Almost every time when I've done it the "lazy way", I've then had some kind of issue and regretted it. So let me tell you how to do it right the first time and save yourself a lot of hassle and headaches. I know it is theoretically possible to have both installed, but the risk of conflicts and driver issues increases exponentially. Considering you don't need and won't be using (and in fact- can't use, since you'll remove the GPU) the old drivers, there is zero reason to keep them installed. Moreover, they will waste system resources for no reason. So, the best thing to do is to clean them out.

1. Download DDU (display driver uninstaller) - this is an app specifically made to thoroughly clean any trace of your old drivers.
2. Reboot your PC into safe mode. This does two things - first, it disables your internet connection, blocking windows from automatically downloading drivers. Second, it stops any other app from interfering with the driver uninstall process.
3. Launch DDU, select your GPU vendor and then "clean drivers and shut down". It will remove everything associated with your old drivers and then power down the computer.
4. Swap the old GPU for the new GPU
5. Go into windows as you normally would and download the latest drivers and Adrenalin software from AMD's website. Let it download and install everything it needs to and if it has to - let it restart the computer.

That's it. This will save you a lot of hassle with leftover driver remnants, conflicts, etc. In case you get issues with a specific game, that's usually due to that game having shader caches from the previous GPU. Either look up on how to clear this, or delete and reinstall the affected game(s).

Overall, there is nothing for you to fear. Good luck and enjoy your new GPU!
 
Hi,

In your experience is DDU safe to use - it seems straightforward enough but when an application/utility says that I should back up my whole system before using it I get nervous, it's as if the provider has little faith in their software.

I'm not in a position to back up my whole system, I don't have the backup utilities nor the storage to hold a backup - realistically, I doubt that many do.

So, I accept that there is always a risk when installing software but when a provider specifically states that I should do a backup I do get a little nervous.
 
nheather said:
Hi,

In your experience is DDU safe to use - it seems straightforward enough but when an application/utility says that I should back up my whole system before using it I get nervous, it's as if the provider has little faith in their software.

I'm not in a position to back up my whole system, I don't have the backup utilities nor the storage to hold a backup - realistically, I doubt that many do.

So, I accept that there is always a risk when installing software but when a provider specifically states that I should do a backup I do get a little nervous.
Click to expand...
It's very safe. All it does is remove the vendor-specific drivers and software. Keep in mind Windows still has a set of generic drivers to provide for a display output independently of any vendor drivers. These are kept intact. I've never had an issue using DDU, and it helped me resolve several driver issues in the past. A total system backup is not really necessary (though backing up critical files is always a good thing to do periodically).
 
Usually just remove old software and install new but once I had to reinstall windows as the colours on the amd looked terrible and ran out of ideas to fix it
 
nheather said:
I'm not in a position to back up my whole system, I don't have the backup utilities nor the storage to hold a backup - realistically, I doubt that many do.
Click to expand...
In most cases, there's only a small amount of critical/unrecoverable files that a person has on their PC. They're often enough to fit on a flash drive or a free service like Google/OneDrive. Backup external HDDs are also fairly cheap to buy, albeit slow to use.

Worrying about uninstalling/reinstalling the drivers is only a small part of the issue, you could lose access to your OS just because of a Windows update (it happened to a PC I manage just a few days ago).
 
rare said:
I would uninstall the NVIDIA drivers, remove the GeForce, install the Radeon and install its drivers…job done
Click to expand...

Yeah I've done this loads of times and not had any issues really in recent years - back like 2008 or so it was advisable to do a proper clean up but these days the drivers will even co-exist fine on the same system for example my Lenovo Legion Go uses AMD drivers for the internal (SoC) GPU and nVidia drivers for the 3070 eGPU I use with it when "docked".
 
Last edited:
All done - thanks for your advice.

I didn't bother with DDU in the end, just removed the GeForce drivers and applications, restarted to complete and then shutdown. Removed the 1160 and fitted the 9060. Booted and then ran the latest Adrenalin software.

All worked fine.

Need a new monitor now because FPS now limited by the monitor.
 
May the Geforce not be with you.

would still run DDU and clear out all the old geforce stuff that is probably still there like a GeForce ghost.
 
nheather said:
All done - thanks for your advice.

I didn't bother with DDU in the end, just removed the GeForce drivers and applications, restarted to complete and then shutdown. Removed the 1160 and fitted the 9060. Booted and then ran the latest Adrenalin software.

All worked fine.

Need a new monitor now because FPS now limited by the monitor.
Click to expand...
Have a peek in device manager and tick "show hidden items". Might have a ghost entry for the Nvidia GPU. Which you can now safely delete. :)
 
Was running both with my 3060 Ti as I was using the 7800X3D iGPU for one of my monitors and I wanted to test its streaming ability :)

No issues at all..

Now I have a 9070 I've evicted the Nvidia drivers from my system :cry:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom