NVIDIA Driver Backward Compatibility | Generated by AI
Correct. The NVIDIA driver is backward-compatible. Driver 580.x supports CUDA 12.0 through 13.0.
When you install torch==2.5.1+cu124, it bundles its own CUDA 12.4 runtime libraries inside the pip package. The driver just needs to be new enough to support that CUDA version — 580.x is more than sufficient. No driver install, no system CUDA change.
So yes, this machine can run both:
- System CUDA 13.0 (whatever uses it natively)
- CUDA 12.4 wheels in a venv (torch/triton via pip)
They don’t conflict — the venv’s CUDA runtime is self-contained, talks to the same driver via the kernel module.