I only found in the blender docs to “install the latest drivers”, but not what’s the minimum required. Anyone knows if this information is available somewhere ?
Hi.
It is recommended to use the latest drivers because they are supposed to have fewer bugs, but requirements are not expressed in terms of driver versions. In general, requirements are expressed in OpenGL capabilities, vRAM and Hardware age:
Edit:
They also recommend having the latest drivers in case of new features like when OptiX was introduced for nvidia cards or HIP for AMD cards.
The latest simply means the latest available driver for your card on the official driver download web site (as long as the GPU support is still active).
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Generally that’s true but sometimes the driver version is mentioned, at least on the raw release notes before they’re made pretty.
For 3.0 the minimum version is 470 due to improved hair/curve rendering: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/3.0/Cycles
For 2.92 the minimum version was 450 for supporting higher instance counts:
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.92/Cycles
No additional driver version minimum has been made since then though (for nVidia at least)
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Thank you, it is just that I’d avoid updating the drivers every month or so if it is not necessary, I’m not a gamer. And updating drivers may more often than not cause issues in my experience. They say “do not fix what works fine”.
Do you happen to know if it is now safe to download nvidia drivers ? I mean about a month ago nvidia was hacked and they recommended to don’t download. But I can’t find any news.
They recommended to be cautious about the source of downloads, downloading drivers from Nvidia’s official website has always been safe and has never been hacked (at least not that has been revealed to the public)
Ok so I can download from nvidia as always. Thank you so much.
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