Driver mixing & why it’s a bad thing

13 Jun 2016

Today I’ll talk a little about driver mixing, which in short is the act of mixing two modded drivers by installing one over the other without first uninstalling the prior one.

Why is it a bad thing?
Because we’re dealing with inheritance between drivers. Basically, the new driver gets all the settings from the driver it’s replacing, which may also include files. So a driver that normally would crash your system would work now - until you restart the computer.

This means a user can wrongly attribute what the new driver is capable of when in fact it’s just running the old driver’s settings with a few flipped values caused by the new driver being installed over it. This can also cause some weird bugs which are not present in either of the drivers to begin with.

This can cause a lot of frustration for a driver modder since he can not find the cause of the bug.

So how do I avoid driver mixing?
The easiest way is to uninstall the previous driver before installing the new one and maybe even run DDU for good measure. It will give you the best the new driver has to offer and save you (and the modder) a lot of headaches later on.

  • Posted by trixarian