Production Branch vs New Feature Branch

NVIDIA ships its RTX Enterprise workstation driver on two branches, Production Branch (PB) and New Feature Branch (NFB). Production Branch is the rebrand of the Quadro Optimal Driver for Enterprise (ODE). NVIDIA says it offers ISV certification, long life-cycle support and security updates. New Feature Branch is the former Quadro New Feature (QNF) driver. It serves users who need a specific feature, bug fix or new operating system support between Production releases. On Linux the older names are Long Lived Branch and Short Lived Branch.

NVIDIA states that NFB support is shorter than PB support, with reduced product support, and recommends NFB only for users who need features named in its release notes. NVIDIA's 582.78 release notes, dated July 30, 2026, label Release 580 a Production Branch and recommend Production Branch drivers for enterprise deployment and certification with professional applications. The same notes say Release 580 will be the last branch to support Maxwell, Pascal and Volta GPUs.

Run Production Branch on any machine that needs ISV certification. Move to a New Feature Branch only for one named fix or feature, then return at the next Production release. Read the release notes for the exact driver version.

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Last verified October 30, 2026.