Does updating CUDA driver(not the framework) affect applications?

Hi,

Does updating CUDA driver (w/o updating CUDA framework) affect yesteryear’s installations that were built using an earlier version of the driver?

Thank you…

Generally, it should not. Newer drivers are compatible with older CUDA toolkits.

There may be a few corner cases. For example, recently it was announced that support for older CUDA GPUs (cc1.x devices) was being deprecated. Future drivers may drop support for those GPUs. In that case, updating a driver may result in a GPU no longer being supported, in an otherwise functional setup.

Note that the CUDA JIT compiler is part of the driver. So if an application uses JIT compilation from PTX as opposed to precompiled binary SASS (machine code), performance differences could occur when the driver changes. Most of them would likely be positive, but performance regressions are possible.

Thank you much!