Detecting which driver is installed

Gaming and Visualization Technologies General Topics and Other SDKs
1

Can someone from NVIDIA driver team please clarify the following:

  • What is the proper way of detecting which driver flavor is installed on Windows platform?

NVIDIA has 4 driver flavors – Standard, DCH, Game Ready, and Studio. We need an officially supported way of detecting which driver is currently installed. So far it seems to be possible to identify DCH drivers using a registry key, but there is no known way of detecting Studio (CRD) .vs. Game Ready (GRD) drivers.

This information is important for diagnostics tools and troubleshooting, as well as for 3rd party automatic driver download / update tools which need a way to determine the correct driver to download and install.

Please advise.

2

Is there anyone from NVIDIA who can help?

3

Hi @igor.levicki,

NVCP shows Standard or DCH

nvcp
nvcp558×516 13.3 KB

Best,
Tom

4

Hi @TomNVIDIA

Yes I know that, but it doesn’t show Game Ready .vs. Studio drivers, and in any case we need a programmatic way of discovering that information. A registry key, or an API call. I am not asking this as an end user, but as a developer who wants to integrate and use this information.

5

Hi Igor,

I have forwarded this on to our engineers for a look. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks,
Tom

6

@TomNVIDIA Let me add that I know there is a registry key which can be used to detect standard .vs. DCH drivers – What I am not sure whether that is the official way so I would appreciate clarification. In addition to that we need either a registry key or an API that would tell us whether installed driver is Game Ready or Studio.

7

Hi @igor.levicki,

The engineer informed me that he would have an answer posted here sometime tomorrow.

Thanks for your patience.

Tom

8

@TomNVIDIA Any update on this?

9

Hi @igor.levicki
Per our engineering team, there is no public method to ping the driver/check registry to identify the type of driver installed (Studio Driver/Game Ready Driver/Quadro Driver).

Regards,
Manuel

10

@ManuelGuzman Well yes I am aware of that, can you please ask them if they could implement it? Any official method would be better than guessing or creating dependencies on internal details which may change in the future.