Over the last few months, NVIDIA GPU drivers have been causing a lot of headaches for gamers and PC users. It all started in January when NVIDIA released new drivers for their latest RTX 50-series graphics cards. Unfortunately, these updates brought along some serious issues like black screens, games crashing unexpectedly, and overall system instability.
These problems didn’t just affect the new 50-series cards they started showing up on older GPUs too. Many users have been sharing their frustrations on Reddit and NVIDIA’s support forums. For a lot of them, the only reliable fix has been rolling back to the older December driver version 566.36. But if you’ve got one of the new RTX 50-series cards, you can’t go back because that driver doesn’t support the latest GPUs.
In response, NVIDIA has been scrambling to fix things. They’ve pushed out several updates over the past couple of months, including the recent 576.02 driver. While it did fix some bugs, it also created new ones. After installing it, people started noticing that their GPU monitoring tools (like MSI Afterburner) weren’t showing the right temperatures. This caused confusion, especially for users who set custom fan curves based on temperature readings.
To fix this, NVIDIA quickly released another update 576.15 which is a hotfix meant to deal with the temperature reporting issues. It also addresses a problem where RTX 50-series cards weren’t dropping to low-power idle mode and another issue that caused flickering in some games. If you’ve got one of the newer GPU drivers or use sleep mode a lot, NVIDIA highly recommends installing this update.
Despite these fixes, there are still many problems that haven’t been resolved. G-Sync users have reported stuttering and crashes in games, and NVIDIA has acknowledged they’re still working on at least 15 open issues related to the 576.02 driver.
This situation is surprising, especially since NVIDIA’s drivers have historically been very reliable, often more stable than those from AMD or Intel. In fact, this is the fourth hotfix NVIDIA has released in just two months, which is unusual.
But the trouble didn’t stop with the drivers. The RTX 50-series launch itself was rocky. Some users reported that the power cables on their RTX 5090 cards were melting, and NVIDIA had to admit that a few GPUs left the factory missing important rendering hardware due to a rare manufacturing fault. Plus, the cards have been hard to find at retail prices, frustrating many gamers hoping to upgrade.
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- NVIDIA’s software team is reportedly working on a larger overhaul to improve long-term driver stability, which might be released later this year.
- If you’re building a PC or upgrading soon, it might be worth waiting a bit until these issues settle down or considering an AMD GPU if you want to avoid driver headaches.
- Some community-based solutions, like using older GPU BIOS or modded drivers, have started appearing but they can be risky and should only be used by experienced users.
- For now, the best course of action is to stay updated on NVIDIA’s official support page, install hotfixes when available, and be cautious with new updates unless they directly solve a problem you’re facing.
