Is it bad if my GPU driver is 8 months out of date?

V-Ray GPU V-Ray GPU :: General
1

I currently use a dual GPU combo - RTX 5090 + GTX 1080 Ti. I use the 1080 Ti for viewport navigation and for my displays. Unfortunately, I can’t update to the latest Nvidia display drivers because my GTX 1080 Ti stops working if I do - I get black screen and the card is no longer recognized by Windows. I think it’s because Nvidia stopped supporting this old GPU. So the latest driver that supports both cards is 581.57 which is 8 months out of date now.

My questions are:

Is it a problem if I use V-Ray GPU with a driver that’s 8+ months old, or can I safely continue using this old driver?

Is the issue with the 1080 Ti not being recognized when using the latest display drivers related to the fact that Nvidia no longer supports GTX 1080 Ti in their newest drivers?

Thanks in advance.

2

Have you tried just running the PC without the 1080? I have a 4090 here, no other cards, and I render while I work, have Vantage running when modelling, etc and have no issues.

3

I know I can run it without the 1080 Ti, but I like using the full 32 GB on my card. Viewports “eat” at least a few GB from the VRAM, especially in complex scenes, and you also get reduced performance when navigating in the viewport while IPR is running. :confused:

4

Hey Alex,
We were just talking about this topic internally, how 3Ds Max 2027 eats +7 GB of VRAM on Blackwell GPUs without any scenes open which is a huge chunk of GPU memory. I understand why you would keep using the 1080Ti for viewport performance. Driver 581.57 is very solid and you could keep using it for now.

That being said we are implementing DLSSi in V-Ray and V-Ray GPU, which will require 595 drivers or higher. This will come out later and then you will need to update your driver.

If you run into something that doesn’t work with driver 581.57 let us know.

Best,

Muhammed

5

Thanks, Muhammed. Hopefully this means I won’t have to buy a new GPU for a while when GTX 1080 Ti still works perfectly for viewport navigation.

Can you share a bit more about DLSSi? What is this exactly? I know about DLSS, but not DLSSi, and I didn’t find anything on the internet about it.

Also, can I still continue using the old driver if I don’t use DLSSi? Will V-Ray and V-Ray GPU continue working as normal?

6

Hi Alex,

Sorry about the typo — I meant DLSS, not DLSSi.

This is the same NVIDIA DLSS technology that is already available in Chaos Vantage. We are currently working on bringing it into V-Ray and V-Ray GPU as an optional image reconstruction/upscaling workflow for interactive rendering.

You do not need to update your driver if you do not plan to use DLSS and your current setup is working well. V-Ray and V-Ray GPU should continue working normally with driver 581.57.

That said, once the DLSS feature becomes available in V-Ray / V-Ray GPU, it will require a newer NVIDIA driver, so updating will only be needed if you want to use that specific feature.

I also made a note to ask NVIDIA about Pascal / GTX 1080 Ti support with newer drivers, to get a clearer confirmation on what is happening there.

Best,
Muhammed

7

Thanks so much, Muhammed!