Over the past four months, Nvidia’s GPU drivers have faced significant issues. The problems began with the release of the drivers for the RTX 50-series cards in January, which led to black screen incidents, game crashes, and overall stability issues affecting both new and existing graphics cards. Recently, Nvidia has rolled out another hotfix aimed at addressing a range of problems stemming from these troublesome drivers.
Nvidia GPU users have experienced ongoing challenges, as highlighted in numerous posts on Reddit and Nvidia’s support forums. Many have resolved their problems by reverting to the December 566.36 driver, which predates the RTX 50-series release. Unfortunately, those who are lucky enough to own the latest GPUs cannot revert to the older drivers since they are incompatible with the new series. In response to these issues, Nvidia has been issuing a series of updates to find solutions.
Last week’s release of driver version 576.02 aimed to include numerous bug fixes, promising to remediate several issues that have affected users in recent months. However, some users reported that the situation worsened; GPU monitoring utilities were failing to display accurate GPU temperatures after the update. As a result, Nvidia was compelled to release a hotfix driver yesterday to rectify this problem.
The newly released 576.15 hotfix also addresses concerns regarding lower idle GPU clock speeds for RTX 50-series users and resolves flickering issues in certain games that arose after the installation of the prior 576.02 driver. For those using RTX 50-series GPUs or frequently utilizing sleep mode with GPU monitoring tools like Afterburner, installing this hotfix is highly recommended to optimize performance and temperature management.
While this latest hotfix addresses critical issues, reports from Nvidia forum users indicate that problems persist, including game crashes, performance drops, and stuttering when using G-Sync in some titles. Currently, Nvidia is monitoring at least 15 unresolved issues with its 576.02 driver, which are expected to be tackled in the upcoming official driver release.
In the last two months, Nvidia has launched four hotfix drivers, which is an unusually high number of patches between the main Windows Hardware Quality Labs (WHQL) releases. This is particularly surprising given that Nvidia’s GPU drivers have historically been stable and outperformed AMD and Intel rivals in terms of game compatibility, performance, and reliability.
