NVIDIA in trouble: buggy drivers, games crashing, and black screens mid-play.
NVIDIA Drivers: The Storm of Bugs and Hotfixes Plagues the Gaming Community
If you have an NVIDIA GPU and feel like your gaming has turned into a jumpscare horror movie with a black screen ... you're not alone. Since January, NVIDIA has been stumbling over its own pixels with a series of drivers that do more harm than good.
The trouble started with the release of the drivers for the RTX 50 series, and it's only gotten worse since then. Games are crashing randomly, the system is freezing, and there are even faulty temperature readings. And what did NVIDIA do? They released a flood of hotfixes , emergency updates that are trying to put out a fire with a leaky bucket.
People aren't happy...
On NVIDIA forums and Reddit, chaos reigns. Users are reverting to version 566.36 (from December 2024), which was still stable. But if you have a brand new RTX 50 series... bad news: this old version doesn't even recognize the card.
Last week driver 576.02 was released promising improvements. Did it improve things? It did, but it created another problem — temperature sensors malfunctioning and displaying incorrect data in apps like MSI Afterburner and similar ones.
Result: another update is live, now version 576.15 , released on April 21st. This time, NVIDIA attempted to fix:
- Bugged idle clock on the RTX 50 series.
- Temperature readings on monitors
- And flickering in some games with G-Sync enabled.
But even with all that, the bugstorm is still ongoing. People continue to report instability, crashes, and inconsistent performance.
And what did NVIDIA say?
The company confirmed that it still has at least 15 pending bugs related to driver 576.02, and promised that it should resolve everything in a future official version (without hotfixes this time). In the last two months alone, there have been 4 hotfixes — which is quite unusual coming from a brand that has always had a reputation for having the most reliable drivers in the industry.
In other words: if you have an RTX 50 series card or use monitoring tools, installing driver 576.15 is the best course of action for now. But keep an eye out because the driver war is far from over.