Quadro Drivers: 390 vs 418

Gaming and Visualization Technologies General Topics and Other SDKs Drivers - Linux, Windows, MacOS
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Hey, everyone,

My old laptop is Lenovo W540. It has Nvidia Quadro K2100M. I’ve always used the driver provided by the manufacturer but recently I experienced lag when using Discord. The lag appears when I join a voice channel and I turn on my camera. A friend of mine told me to install the latest possible driver that I can find on Nvidia’s website. So I went to Nvidia.com and clicked Drivers in the top right corner. I transferred to this page: Official Drivers | NVIDIA

I searched for my driver:

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and saw that the latest one is from 2020 and it’s version 418. I tried to install it but I got this error:

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So I changed the driver type to standard and did another search

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and I saw that the latest driver is from 2021 and it’s version 390.

I installed it and went to Nvidia Control Center → System Information because I wanted to see the Driver Type but I wasn’t able to find it:

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Anyway, I started wondering why the latest version 390 from 2021 is smaller (by its version number) than the 418 from 2020. As far as I read on the internet: DCH and Standard are the same functionally but DCH is smaller in size and it installs faster.

Can anyone shed some light here?
Is there a way for me to change the driver type to DCH?

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Hi there @ivaylostoyanovns and welcome to the NVIDIA developer forums!

Check out How do I find the correct GPU driver for my use-case? where I give some background on the different aspects of the Download page.

I do not mention DCH there though, which seems like an oversight now.

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What the text explains is that older systems, like your own, simply do not support the DCH design. As such they also do not have the “Driver Type” in the control panel details.

The reason for the older version number but newer release is exactly because of this. We still want to support older Hardware as long as it makes sense, so older driver versions might still get patches and updates that are already part of newer versions but were not back-ported yet.

I hope this helps explain this a bit.

Thanks!

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