Hi there! In this entry, I’m going to explain to you how you can uninstall your AMD or NVIDIA graphics card’s drivers. As we all know, the standard uninstalling process doesn’t work very well with drivers. This tutorial will teach you how to do it in any Windows version.
First of all, let’s talk about why you’d want to uninstall your graphic card drivers. You may have a list of reasons why:
- You’ve replaced your graphics card with a new one and you want to get rid of your old drivers in order to avoid any conflicts.
- You’ve replaced your graphics card but because of some conflict caused by your old drivers, Windows doesn’t recognize your new card.
- You’re GOING TO replace your graphics card and you want to prevent any possible conflicts.
- You’ve updated your graphics card drivers, but you’re having errors (like blue screens, crashes etc.) and you want to remove the driver completely.
- You’re an expert user and you’ve flashed a new BIOS to your AMD graphics card, but Windows won’t recognize your card. This is happening because your drivers are “tied” to your graphics card’s BIOS code, so to speak. Don’t worry, it’ll go away when you completely remove your drivers and reinstall.
- You want to get rid of AMD’s infamous brand new Crimson drivers.
- You have your reasons and it’s not my business!
Let’s do this! We’re going to do this with the Display Driver Uninstaller, which is provided by Guru3D. Don’t worry; it’s going to be fast and simple.
Here are the steps you need to follow:
- (Optional) Save your desktop icon layout with Desktop Restore. You can get help from my previous entry. The reason I recommend this, is that your desktop icons will probably get messed up after the process.
- Download your desired graphic cards driver. You can get up-to-date drivers for AMD from here and for NVIDIA here.
- Download the Display Driver Uninstaller from Guru3D using this link, as instructed below.
Steps for downloading
the Display Driver Uninstaller. - Reboot your computer and when you see your BIOS post screen, start smashing the “F8” key on your keyboard until you get the Advanced Boot Options screen.
The Advanced Boot
Options screen that you’re going to get through pressing F8 while your computer
is booting up. -
When you see the screen above, select “Safe mode” with the help of your cursor keys and press “Enter”, and wait for Windows to boot.
-
Run Display Driver Uninstaller. You’re going to see a screen like the below one. First, select the driver you want to uninstall (AMD or NVIDIA) from the red bordered top-down menu. Then, use the blue bordered “Clean and restart” option if you want to just replace your drivers with another one, or use the purple bordered “Clean and shutdown” option if you’re going to replace your graphics card with another one. Display Driver Uninstaller will do the rest automatically and will reboot/shut down your system according to your selection.
Display Driver
Uninstaller window with instructions. -
Let Windows boot up and then install your pre-downloaded graphics card drivers by following the necessary steps shown to you.
Voila! Now you’re system is completely clean of old-ass driver remnants and you’ve installed your brand new drivers (or old drivers that you wanted to go back to). If your problems still persist, they may have other hardware or software-related causes. In that case you should get help from your manufacturer or someone who knows their way around computers (like us, through comments).