Manufacturer drivers vs generic drivers...

[vollman1]

After buying a new video card, I went to Asus site to look for drivers. I noticed that the latest driver there was dated late December, 2011, and it was bundled with Catalyst 11.8.

Now, if I update the Catalyst, it gives me a generic 6950 driver in place of the Asus one.

So...

My questions are:

1) Is there any drawback to using a generic 6950 driver over the Asus one, like performance or other wise?

2) Is there a way to update Catalyst without overriding the existing gpu driver?


Thanks in advance

 

[striker410]

Hi Vollman,

I'll only answer the first question, as I know nothing of the second.

I see no reason why you would need to use vendor drivers. In the end, all the actual GPU's are the same, only things like the cooler vary. If I had to guess, they do this so they can "verify" that it does indeed work with that specific card. You should be just fine with generic drivers.

 

[geofelt]

Graphics card vendors will include a cd with the appropriate driver. It is the driver that was in use by the graphics card manufacturer to test the card near when the package was produced.
It is not wrong to install that driver, at least initially. Particularly if you do not have access to the internet.

Over time, the graphics card source(nvidia/AMD) will update their drivers with fixes to errors, new game support, and performance enhancements.
You should, in general download and install their latest drivers from time to time.

 

[kajabla]

+1 striker. The chips are basically the same, with differences usually coming up in places like power regulation. The only stuff that's specific to the card generally deals with temperature and clocks, and you can use MSI Afterburner for that.

 

[vollman1]

Best answer selected by vollman1.