Please let me kindly ask for clarification. Was there a 396 driver version prior to 396.18 that supported these GPUs, and it was only forgotten to update the 396.18 download page?
I know as despite the version numbers, it becomes obvious when you try to get the drivers running under recent kernels. While 390 only requires little patching, similar to the 470 or 490 series, it is merely impossible to get 396 compiled out of the box as the last changes to the files were more than 4 years ago.
However, that entry on the download page made me curious. Perhaps there used to be some kind of previous setting to get that 396 driver running with the GeForce GTX 560. Sadly, it looks like this is not the case as the website maintainers apparently simply forgot to remove the GeForce 400 and GeForce 500 sections from the Supported Products tab.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to leave feedback on that page as the “Rate this page” feature has also been disabled long time ago.
The info on the downloads page is grossly wrong, partially as a result from some information mismanagement/disaster of nvidia at the time the 390/396 drivers were released.
The official announcement was like: “support for fermi based geforce products was ended, the 390 driver being the last to support it”
The press and obviously also the web team then wondered “Oh, so fermi quadro products are still supported?”. So the 396 drivers page still listed them, but geforce like gtx4xx and gtx 5xx were removed. Then there was a small uproar and somebody seems to have told them “quadros are like geforce” but instead of removing the quadros from the list, they readded the geforce types. Which is just wrong. Then they never re-worked it again since everyone was already going away with their eyes rolling.
Funny story about what happens in large companies.
Thanks a lot for that comprehensive information. I can only confirm that this kind of mess is common in large companies, mainly just because too many cooks spoil the broth. There are too many people involved in each process which finally leads to some kind of chinese whisper effect at best.
Unfortunately, this means you cannot trust the information on the download pages whatsoever. Where should I know if a particular GPU’s information was not affected by a similar misunderstanding?
That being said, some doubts are coming up if my other card, a GeForce GTX 750 Ti, is indeed supported by the 495.46 driver as announced on its page:
As we all know, the most important change on new driver versions is removal of chipsets considered not worth being supported anymore. So it might be possible that we have a similar issue with 495.46 and the GeForce GTX 750Ti :-)
At least the 750ti is Maxwell based, so the information is likely correct.
The problem is that the model number can be ambiguous, e.g. there are gt730s built on Fermi (driver 390) and Kepler (driver 470), the gt(x)8xxM series being a weird mix of fermis, keplers and maxwells.
You can only rely on the chip name as displayed by lspci, like GK208 being a kepler, 2nd gen.