Nvidia’s GPU drivers are a mess
Nvidia’s GPU drivers have been a disaster over the past four months. It all started when Nvidia released its drivers for the RTX 50-series cards in January, and introduced black screen issues, game crashes, and general stability problems for new and existing graphics cards. Now, yet another new hotfix has emerged to fix even more issues introduced by Nvidia’s buggy drivers.
Nvidia GPU owners have been struggling for months with a variety of issues reported on Reddit and in Nvidia’s own support forums, with most people fixing their issues by rolling back to the December 566.36 driver before the RTX 50-series. Those fortunate enough to secure one of Nvidia’s latest GPUs aren’t able to roll back to the old drivers as they simply don’t support the new RTX 50-series, so Nvidia has been issuing a series of updates to try and address the problems.
The 576.02 driver release last week, which included lots of bug and crash fixes, seemed like it would finally solve the issues that have plagued Nvidia’s driver releases over the past few months, but it has made things worse for some. Posters in the Nvidia forums have been reporting issues with GPU monitoring utilities not reporting the correct GPU temperatures since installing 576.02, so Nvidia was forced to release a hotfix driver yesterday to address this issue.
The latest 576.15 hotfix also includes fixes for lower idle GPU clock speeds for RTX 50-series owners, and some fixes for certain games flickering after updating to last week’s 576.02 driver. I would highly recommend installing this hotfix driver if you’re on an RTX 50-series GPU or you regularly set your PC to sleep mode and use GPU monitoring utilities like Afterburner to control a custom fan curve based on GPU temperatures.
While this latest hotfix driver addresses some important issues, Nvidia forum posters are still reporting lots of game crashes, performance issues, and stuttering when using G-Sync in certain games. Nvidia is currently tracking at least 15 open issues with its 576.02 driver that will hopefully be addressed with the next official driver release.
Nvidia has released four hotfix drivers over the past two months, which is a surprising amount of hotfixes between the main Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) releases. It’s also surprising because, for the most part, Nvidia’s GPU drivers have always been stable and better than the AMD and Intel competition at game compatibility, performance, and crash-free gaming.
Nvidia’s driver issues come after a turbulent launch of the RTX 50-series cards. Some RTX 5090 power cables have been melting, Nvidia had to admit that some of its new GPUs had a “rare” manufacturing issue that meant they were missing render units, and some of Nvidia’s marketing claims have been questionable. The RTX 50-series cards have also been difficult to find in stock at retail prices, leaving many PC gamers frustrated by Nvidia’s latest GPU launch.