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It seems like whenever I want to see if I have the latest version of a driver installed, the version number I see in Device Manager seems unrelated to the version number of the driver I installed.

Example: I just installed Nvidia's 359.00 GeForce display driver, but when I look under Display Adapter in Device Manager, it says the version is 10.18.13.5900.

But it's not just Nvidia - it seems like every time I've tried this on any driver for any hardware the numbers don't match. Am I missing something? Is there any way to compare versions short of installing both versions and comparing within Device Manager?

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  • It's basically the same reason an iPhone 6s doesn't use a 6s CPU and a 6s GPU. Different components follow different naming rules.
    – David Schwartz
    Commented Nov 24, 2015 at 1:01

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Unfortunately one is the internal version of the signed driver files and the other is the external version published and publicized by the company - and there is no onus placed on the developer or publisher for them to match.

The best you can do is approximately match the dates. Since the internal driver date will be timestamped by a CA server, it must be before the official release date on the site. Unfortunately, that can be anywhere from 3 months to 24 hours before the release date on the site, so it's not perfectly reliable.

This isn't just the case for drivers - right-click any exe and look at the "Details" tab (if it's there) - you'll see that there is file version info there that does not necessarily (and in fact almost never does) match up with the published release version on the website. It's just the way things are, unfortunately.

However, if you refer to the driver release notes and change history included with the download, it will often (though obviously not necessarily) contain a blurb/statement saying "driver updated to version xxxx" or similar, where that is the version number you are looking for. So your best bet is to check for and reference the release notes.

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This is the internal driver version that you see. But it ready includes your requested driver version data 10.18.13.5900 (359.00)

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  • Thanks for pointing that out. Unfortunately that's not the case universally - my Avid hardware driver version 9.0.8 shows up as Microsoft (?) version 10.0.10586.0 once installed...
    – Fred Hamilton
    Commented Nov 24, 2015 at 17:40
  • this is the internal version number for GRAPHIC drivers and not for all other drivers.
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Nov 24, 2015 at 19:20
  • Is it universal for graphic drivers (i.e. Intel and AMD) or is it just Nvidia deciding to be helpful?
    – Fred Hamilton
    Commented Nov 25, 2015 at 19:27
  • My Intel HD driver is 10.18.10.3958 and the 3958 shows that my version is the 15.33.30.64.**3958**. 10 is the internal and 15 the external version.
    – magicandre1981
    Commented Nov 26, 2015 at 5:26

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