NVIDIA in trouble: buggy drivers, games crashing and black screen in the middle of gameplay
If you have an NVIDIA GPU and are finding that your gaming experience has turned 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 started with the release of the drivers for the RTX 50 line, and from there it only got worse. Games crashing out of nowhere, the system freezing and even messed up temperature readings. And what did NVIDIA do? It sent out a flood of hotfixes , emergency updates that try to put out fires with a leaky bucket.
The crowd is not happy…
On NVIDIA's forums and Reddit, chaos is real. Users are reverting back to version 566.36 (from 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 with promises of improvements. Did it improve? Yes, but it created another problem — temperature sensors going crazy and recording incorrect data in apps like MSI Afterburner and similar.
Result: another update is out, now 576.15, released on 04/21. This time, NVIDIA tried to fix:
- Idle clock bug on 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 there are still at least 15 pending bugs related to driver 576.02, and promised that they should be fixed in the next official release (without a hotfix this time). In the last two months alone, there have been 4 hotfixes — which is unusual for 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 or use monitoring tools, installing driver 576.15 is the best way to go for now . But keep an eye out because the driver war is far from over.