If you’ve just purchased a new graphics card to upgrade from an older NVIDIA card, before you install the new card, it would be a good idea to uninstall your NVIDIA drivers.
Doing so will minimize the possibility that you’ll run into issues after you upgrade to your new GPU.
In this quick tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to uninstall your NVIDIA drivers.
How to Uninstall NVIDIA Drivers Using DDU
Display Driver Uninstaller (or DDU) is an application that makes uninstalling graphics drivers quick and simple. Unlike other methods, using DDU will completely remove drivers.
If you don’t have DDU, here’s how to get it:
Go to the DDU download page.
Click the link that says ‘Download DDU: Portable / self-extracting.’
Save the application. Then, go into the folder it was saved to and open it. This will open 7-Zip so that you can extract the files.
Choose a location to extract the files to and hit ‘Extract.’ Remember this location so you can find DDU.
DDU recommends that you use it in Safe Mode, so you should boot into Safe Mode now to continue.
To boot into Safe Mode in Windows 10 or 11, do the following:
- Click on the start menu
- Click settings
- Go into Recovery
- In the ‘Advanced startup’ section hit ‘Restart Now’
- This will restart your PC and bring you to the Advanced startup menu (an all blue screen with a handful of options)
- Select Troubleshoot, then Advanced Options, then Startup Settings, then Restart
- Your computer will restart and a list of choices will pop up
- To choose Safe Mode, hit F4
- Your PC will now boot into Safe Mode
Once you’ve booted into Windows in Safe Mode, you’re going to open the folder that you extracted DDU to.
In that folder, locate the and start the Display Driver Uninstaller Application.
The first time you run DDU, a bunch of options will pop-up.
You can leave these as-is, but we recommend:
- Unchecking Show offers from our partners
- Checking Prevent downloads from “Windows update” when “Windows” search for a driver for a device
Close the options once you’re finished.
In DDU, click the —Select device type— drop-down menu and hit “GPU”. This will auto-detect your NVIDIA GPU.
If you’re not installing a new graphics card and you just want to delete your NVIDIA drivers (and reinstall them again after) hit ‘Clean and restart.’
Otherwise, if you’re installing a new graphics card, hit ‘Clean and shutdown.’
DDU will now start removing all NVIDIA drivers. Once finished, your PC will shutdown.
If you’re installing a new graphics card, do so now.
Otherwise, reboot into Windows, and reinstall your NVIDIA drivers.
