Windows 10 Home Setup Says GeForce GTX 650 Is Not Compatible

Hello everyone,,,

I've been happily running Windows 8.0 (not 8.1) for a few years on a home-built computer and I was over six years behind on updates.

Sidebar Explanation: Updates for me have been historically frustrating because I can think of many times when things perform flawlessly for me, then I install an update, and suddenly something doesn't work correctly anymore, or I have other problems, when the only thing I had done to the system was update it. So I have often eschewed updates solely for that reason. My computer worked. It did everything I wanted it to do. I didn't get viruses or malware because I was careful about what I was doing online. Occasionally I might have gotten a Potentially Unwanted Program from some toolbar, but that was easily fixed. I was happy.

Anyway, updating was kind of frustrating because of problems irrelevant to this post, so I went to Walmart and brought Windows 10 Home...home. Excited to be upgrading so I can update Photoshop to a version that's not compatible with Windows 8, I stuck the USB stick into my computer and started the process. After a step or two and several minutes of waiting, I was greeted with this screen:


Well, that card is actually listed as a compatible card for Windows 10! So naturally, I'm confused. I don't have the very latest driver installed for the card in Windows 8, but I assumed the setup would check the actual hardware, not the driver running it.

The Nvidia site is confusing. The page for the GTX 650 has DirectX 12 listed as a technology:

Specifications | GeForce

But when viewing their list of DirectX-Compatible cards, the GTX 650 is not listed. Research outside Nvidia shows that the 650 GTX has DirectX support only through "feature levels", but only full DirectX 11 support.

Can someone clear up my confusion a little?

Thank you.

What you have is clear.
What you need is not ... so I'll guess.

If you worry about Direct X then you play games. Is that right?
If so you "need" a newer video card. That will improve your gaming and eliminate the problem with driver unavailability/lack of support.

If you don't play games, then don't worry about the Direct X compatibility.

I am running here on a gtx 650 with W10 home 1809 without problems.

The 650 GTX should be fine - it is not direct X 12 though. I have Win10 on my Samsung slate7 which has built in Intel(R) HD Graphics 3000 which is poor and the O/S still runs OK.

Are the drivers saying the 650 is not compatible? My 660 GTX on another system had that issue - I ran update drivers from Device Manager and it downloaded drivers and all was well.

Hi,
Update your graphic's driver newest or 1-2 versions back and try again
Are you clean installing from scratch or trying to upgrade ?

You might try to clean install
The ms installer installs a 388. series nvidia driver I believe nvidia them selves only goes back to 399. version on the search page so just how old is your graphic's driver ?

Maybe the best drivers to use for the upgrade are no drivers at all - really the Microsoft Basic drivers.

I suggest that you uninstall and delete the Geforce drivers, and then run the upgrade.

I'm not sure that it will work, but the latest drivers for the Win10 are supposed to support the 650. It's a DX11 card. DX12 features are supported in software (= slow).

Forget about the DirectX stuff, Windows 10 installs with DirectX 12 which is backwards compatible down to Version 9.

All you should have to do is go to the Device Manager > Display adapter > Nvidia > Action > Update driver.

It will search for a driver, not necessarily a version listed by MS updates catalogue/Nvidia/Intel.

Helmut said:

Forget about the DirectX stuff, Windows 10 installs with DirectX 12 which is backwards compatible down to Version 9.

All you should have to do is go to the Device Manager > Display adapter > Nvidia > Action > Update driver.

It will search for a driver, not necessarily a version listed by MS updates catalogue/Nvidia/Intel.

Agreed.....the drivers from Nvidia didn't work as they refused to recognise my 660GTX card. The way above was the way to get the drivers into Win10, at least initially.