I am currently using the CUDA 2.0 enabled driver for GTX 260. Will I have to change the driver if I downgrade to CUDA 1.1 (8500GT ) ?
Why would you downgrade? The compute version of the device has nothing to do with what revision of the driver you can use.
Well i just need to check the performance of a particular algorithm on the other card, basically for comparison purposes. I just wanted to know if I have reinstall the drivers and all. It would be less painful if all i had to was to swap out the cards and run the code and swap them back.
So I take it that I dont have to change the driver ?
No, CUDA 1.1 will work with newer drivers just fine.
However, I’ve seen a performance drop of about 10-15% when switching from 175 to 178 drivers. Guess this is very specific for particular kernel, but may be worth trying if your kernel perfeorms better on older drivers.
But why do you even want to downgrade to CUDA 1.1? CUDA 2.0 will work just fine on your 8500GT.
That being said, windows sometimes gets the crazy idea that when you change GPUs you must change drivers too and happily uninstalls the drivers you previously had installed. Just reinstall the same driver in that case. Linux won’t do something that stupid.
I do this regularly to ensure compatibility with older drivers.
Yeah, I do that too, but the OP seemed to indicate that they were just swapping hardware which doesn’t require a downgrade of CUDA.