Truth is, we don’t always keep up to date with the latest drivers; It’s a hassle, it takes time and effort and it’s just not a fun experience keeping up with dozens of different ones. Thing is, keeping your graphics card up to date is super-important, even if you’re just doing an incremental version update.
This is especially the case if you tend to play popular MMOs or newer games where driver updates can bring better overall performance, including in ambient occlusion and anti-aliasing. This holds true regardless of whether you are using AMD or NVIDIA.
So let’s say you’ve finally decided to update your drivers and you don’t know how to do it. Well, there’s generally two ways you can go about it, either a manual update or through the NVIDIA GeForce Experience.
Manual Update
When updating manually, the first thing you need to know is which NVIDIA card you have. If you already know that, great, but if not, then you’ll have to run the DirectX Diagnostic tool to find out:
- Press the Windows key + R
- Type in dxdiag
- Click on the Display tab and check ‘chip type’ to see which NVIDIA GPU you have
- Additionally, go to the systems tab and look at the ‘operating system’ to see if you have a 32-bit or 64-bit version.
Once you have that info, head over to the NVIDIA website and click on ‘drivers’ on the navigation bar at the top. A new page will pop-up where you can select the information that you gather from dxdiag. After filling in the GPU and System info, click ‘start search’.
When the search is complete, you’ll see a bunch of new things pop up below that say ‘GeForce Game Ready Driver – WHQL’. Click on the latest one which brings you to the driver update’s info page. Once there, click on the ‘download’ button to download the update.
After it finishes downloading, just run the install and click on ‘express install’ or ‘custom install’ if you have specific installation requirements. Once completed, you might be asked to restart your system, which you should do as soon as possible.
NVIDIA GeForce Experience
If you aren’t comfortable going through the procedure of finding the GPU and system info, as well as manually finding and downloading the update, you can always use the NVIDIA GeForce experience which makes things much easier.
First, you’ll want to head over to the specific GeForce Experience page and click the ‘download’ button. Run the launcher and let the application install. Once that’s done, open it up and create an account, or log in if you already have an NVIDIA Account.
After you’ve logged in and the GeForce Experience app opens up, you’ll want to look in the top left and click on a button that says ‘drivers’. On the drivers page, click on ‘Check For Updates’ to make sure you’ll be getting the latest ones. When the check is complete, you’ll either be told that you’re on the latest drivers, or there will be an option to download an update.
If you do get an option to update, then just click the ‘download’ button and either ‘express installation’ or ‘Custom installation’. Let it install itself and restart if need be, and you’re done!
On the other hand, if you’re having some issues with NVIDIA Geforce, you might want to check out our article why Geforce Experience isn’t working.
Final Thoughts
As you can see, updating your NVIDIA drivers isn’t too difficult a task and it shouldn’t scare you off. Make sure to always keep it as up to date as possible, especially if you’re having weird graphical issues or performance with games that you shouldn’t have when rocking a powerful gaming GPU.
Otherwise, enjoy your games and your better performance!