How to find Nvidia driver version from Device Manager on Windows 10
Device Manager on Windows 10 gives a comprehensive look at the hardware and drivers installed on your system. For most cases, the app can install and update drivers with ease. You won’t ever need to install other apps to handle drivers for your Windows 10 machine. If you ever need to check the driver version for a hardware component on your system, Device Manger has you covered. Unfortunately, you will notice that there is often a version difference in the drive that Device Manager reports and the official driver for any hardware component. Nvidia’s GPUs aren’t exempt from this. Here’s how you can find the Nvidia driver version from Device Manager.
Nvidia driver version vs Device Manager version
Nvidia has an official app that can manage drivers on your system however, not everyone installs it. The Nvidia Control Center app is a different story though. Everyone with an Nvidia GPU has it and it lets you look at the GPU driver version that is installed on your system.
If you click on System Information in the Nvidia Control Center app, you will see that the driver version doesn’t match the one that is reported in Device Manager when you expand Display Adapters, double-click your GPU, and go to the Driver tab in the window that opens.
If you look a little closer though, the trailing number after the v 10. that Device Manager reports is actually the same as the driver version that Nvidia’s Control Center app reports.
As to why this happens, it’s because you can receive driver updates in one of two ways on Windows 10. You can get a graphics driver update directly from the manufacturer of a hardware device e.g., you can get GPU drivers from Nvidia if you have an Nvidia chip, or you can get them via Windows 10 updates which is how most users get them if they do not have the Nvidia experience app installed.
The different channels that you get drivers from is the reason the versions are different. Windows 10 usually gets an internal version and its number must be modified on certain parameters so that it works correctly with everything else.
It is highly likely that even if you install drivers via Nvidia’s app, the version number will still be different. It’s also why a newer driver version, one that wasn’t delivered via Windows updates, might cause problems. This version numbering convention generally holds true for Nvidia’s GPUs but may not hold true for other hardware.
