A deep dive into Nvidia‘s recent GPU driver woes by Gamers Nexus has revealed that many of the reported issues are possible to replicate in the right conditions. These issues typically trigger game crashes, and this testing also links the issues to core Nvidia features such as DLSS, frame generation, and even G-Sync.
In our RTX 5090 review, we identify this powerful new Nvidia GPU as the best graphics card for 4K gameplay, but these ongoing driver issues have caused problems for gamers who spent at least $1,999 on the card.
In the above Gamers Nexus video titled “Get it Together, Nvidia,” testing was performed across a number of recent drivers and hotfix updates. However, generally speaking, Gamers Nexus points out that there are “billions, if not hundreds of millions,” of combinations that would need to be tested to provide a definitive insight into what issues are present and replicable.
Luckily, rather than attempting to tackle endless combinations of hardware, games, and game settings, issues frequently posted to forums and Reddit were used to guide testing.
In some cases, crashing a game was as simple as hitting ‘Resume’ on the main menu, as is the case in Star Wars Outlaws. More concerning is in a game such as Marvel Rivals, where the crashes could be linked directly to the activation of Nvidia DLSS. That’s a problem when you consider that Nvidia marketed DLSS 4 and multi frame gen heavily when it launched the RTX 5000 series.
Nvidia GPU driver update 566.36 is believed to be the most stable recent driver update according to Gamers Nexus, but this dates back to December 5, 2024, pre-dating the release of the RTX 5000 series GPUs. This is also the driver that was noted by inZOI and Khazan devs when they issued warnings about rollbacks to improve performance on 40 and 30-series RTX graphics cards.
The problem for RTX 5000 owners is that rolling back to the first available driver for the GPUs will disable features such as multi frame generation and DLSS 4 override in some games. Some of the workarounds for issues related to the Nvidia GPU drivers include swapping how monitors are plugged into your GPU (if using more than one), using HDMI as opposed to DisplayPort, disabling frame gen or G-Sync, and the nuclear option of rolling back your driver to 566.36 (for RTX 40 and 30-series owners), or the most recent update that didn’t cause any crashes.
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