NVIDIA in trouble: buggy drivers, games crashing and black screen in the middle of gameplay
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NVIDIA Drivers: The Storm of Bugs and Hotfixes That Has Been Plaguing the Gaming Community
If you have an NVIDIA GPU and find your gaming experience turning into a horror episode with black-screen jump scares ... you're not alone. Since January, NVIDIA has been tripping over its own pixels with a series of drivers that break more than they help.
The trouble began with the release of the drivers for the RTX 50 series, and it only got worse from there. Games crashed out of nowhere, the system froze, and even erratic temperature readings. And what did NVIDIA do? They sent out a flood of hotfixes , emergency updates that try to put out fires with a leaky bucket.
The crowd is not happy…
On the NVIDIA forums and Reddit, chaos is rife. Users are reverting back to version 566.36 (dated December 2024), which was still stable. But if you have a brand-new RTX 50... bad news: this old version doesn't even recognize the card.
Last week, driver 576.02 was released, promising improvements. Did it improve? Yes, but it created another problem—temperature sensors going haywire and reporting incorrect data in apps like MSI Afterburner and similar apps.
Result: another update is out, now 576.15 , released on April 21st. This time, NVIDIA tried to fix:
- Buggy idle clock on the RTX 50 series
- Temperature reading on monitors
- And flickering in some games with G-Sync enabled
But even with all this, the bugstorm is still going on. 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 to address them all in a future official release (no hotfix this time). In the last two months alone, there have been four hotfixes —which is unusual for a company that has always had a reputation for having the most reliable drivers in the industry.
In other words: if you have an RTX 50 or use monitoring tools, installing driver 576.15 is the best option for now. But keep an eye on it, because the driver wars are far from over.