I had a similar situation going from a Geforce2 to a FX5200 and I didn't have to reinstall drivers... but that was Win9x 😀

If this is for benchmarking I can tell you what I do.

I setup the machine with everything installed, apart from the drivers of whatever I want to benchmark. Then I take an image of the HDD using something like Acronis True Image.

You can set it up on that machine in a way that the process is quite fast. Use a second HDD with the images.

This keeps everything clean and when you done testing one card, you shut the machine down, swap the card, re-image, load the drivers and bench away. With W98 the images are only a few GB.

The fast way is just shutting it down, swapping the card and installing the new driver. Don't bother removing the old one, it's not necessary (within limits).

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I setup the machine with everything installed, apart from the drivers of whatever I want to benchmark. Then I take an image of the HDD using something like Acronis True Image.

You can set it up on that machine in a way that the process is quite fast. Use a second HDD with the images.

This keeps everything clean and when you done testing one card, you shut the machine down, swap the card, re-image, load the drivers and bench away. With W98 the images are only a few GB.

I'm actually getting ready to start doing this. Now that my Win98SE machine has taken its final shape (for now, anyway), I want to start benchmarking some older cards I've collected. Reverting to a clean image after every round of testing seems like the best approach.

My original question pertained more to the occasional swap where I'm not planning on changing driver versions anyhow. Thanks for the info.

It will work as long as the driver package was done correctly. Especially in Win 9x, driver management was done right the first time.