NVIDIA GeForce vs. Studio vs. Quadro Driver: What’s The Difference?

At its GTC event in March, NVIDIA released its first ‘Creator’ driver, one that targeted the ProViz market just as the Game Ready drivers have targeted gamers. Some time later, NVIDIA changed the name from Creator to ‘Studio’, matching the same name applied to notebooks that adhere to NVIDIA’s Studio platform. The Razer Max-Q notebook we took a look at a few months ago is considered to be an official Studio notebook, even though the Studio name came out a month later.

Since the first Studio driver was released, we’ve seen some confusion around the web about what the true differences are. The fact is, though, that there are no true differences at the core level. If you have either Quadro 460.12 (as an example), Game Ready 460.12, and Studio 460.12, they are the exact same driver. They may be packaged differently, but each one will deliver the same intended features and optimizations.

The Quadro driver adds a little oddity to the mix, in that a Quadro driver will not install on a GeForce GPU, even if the driver is supported. We have a feeling this will be fixed in the future, even though it’s not an important “bug” if it happens to be one. Game Ready and Studio install no problem on Quadro and TITAN.

So what’s the point of all of these different drivers? The point is that added features and optimizations are going to hit each respective driver at different times. If a Studio driver launches, it means that particular driver version has been validated by NVIDIA for use with the latest ProViz software. Installing the GeForce equivalent instead wouldn’t change anything. This is the reason the version in the NVIDIA Control Panel doesn’t tell you if it’s Studio or Game Ready; it simply doesn’t matter. It’s the version number that does.

Conversely, if you’re strictly a gamer, it wouldn’t be important to update to the Studio driver if one happened to be newer than the latest Game Ready. Such a release would mean that ProViz enhancements were added, not gaming, so it’d be largely a waste of time to move around drivers like this. Ultimately, if you are a gamer using Game Ready and a creator using Studio, you’re always going to have the latest optimizations you need.

We felt compelled to write this since we’ve been asked a few times recently to test with the Studio driver over the Game Ready one, and we wanted to make clear that it doesn’t actually matter. They are in fact the same driver at the end of the day if they share the same version number.