Depends... sometimes its built specifically to kernels. One common instance is, blender's Cycles renderer. Every time there is a new NVIDIA GPU. It needs to be

Depends... sometimes its built specifically to kernels. One common instance is, blender's Cycles renderer. Every time there is a new NVIDIA GPU. It needs to be recompiled to support it. Sometimes that also requires a new CUDA version to be able to do it. CUDA versions over the years have deprecated different operations and what not.