Not a duplicate of this question
When downloading NVIDIA GPU drivers, I've also been asked for some time which CUDA toolkit I prefer.
Now, what does this choice imply when downloading a driver?
As far as I know, different CUDA toolkits have different minimum drivers supporting them (also stated in the release notes), but what does this choice at the driver download page imply?
Generally speaking, there is a backwards compatibility strategy for drivers with respect to CUDA toolkits. For example, the latest driver should work with any older CUDA toolkit. An older driver may not work with a newer CUDA toolkit.
That is a general statement of compatibility. You can find it expressed here (e.g. table 1) also.
However, each CUDA toolkit ships with a particular driver branch. For example CUDA 10.1 ships with a 418.xx driver branch (this corresponds to the version of the GPU driver that is bundled with the CUDA toolkit installer).
So even though a 430.xx driver is compatible with and should work with CUDA 10.1, that isn't actually the driver branch that ships with CUDA 10.1
The dropdown allows you to select a driver that is in the same branch as the driver that particular CUDA toolkit was shipped with and has the highest test coverage with.
