Nvidia driver issues.

[ChadD]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTXoUsdSAnA

I know there is probably more then one thread in the Nvidia sections about driver issues, and game developers suggesting roll backs for users. The youtube tech jesus making solo NV driver stability videos seems like front page news. I also read somewhere that the path of exile 2 team have had NV issues they couldn't debug, that their work around was to save the game load state to recover from when the crash kicks in. Seems like a lot of developers with NV issues right now.

I gotta say 2025 feels like the universe is correcting, maybe after Cern split the universes they are re aligning?
I hoped AMD would start putting up a bit of a fight. (I won't pretend to be completely unbiased) I did not however think AMD could actually really gain a ton of mind share this gen. I really didn't think they would do much better then the last gen. I hoped but didn't expect it. They got lucky with the 5000 supply issues. Nvidia having a months long string of widely reported driver issues though? I mean, maybe Lisa Su built her own particle accelerator. It all seems too good to be true. (I joke I hope everyone effected with NV black screen issues and what not get new fixed drivers sooner rather then later) 110% though AMD is KICKING themselves they didn't push that 9090 XTX part out the door.

 

[DukenukemX]

I've also been dealing with Nvidia drivers. Got my nephew a RTX 3060 for Christmas but was having issues and thought nothing of it since he was running a Z170 with 6600K, and blamed it on the motherboard. Particularly the BIOS menu would corrupt when trying to access it. Eventually I replace the CPU with a Ryzen 7600X and thought the menu bugs would go away, but they persisted. It wasn't until I tried running off the AMD built in graphics is when I realized the issue only occurs on the 3060. The problem does go away when hooked up to another monitor and blamed the old TV I was using. Even Dawid Does Tech ran into problems. The days of Nvidia having better drivers than AMD are gone.

View: https://youtu.be/pOv7QbRp89c?si=9CEY-bmKFfF6krXV

 

[ZeroBarrier]

I've also been dealing with Nvidia drivers. Got my nephew a RTX 3060 for Christmas but was having issues and thought nothing of it since he was running a Z170 with 6600K, and blamed it on the motherboard. Particularly the BIOS menu would corrupt when trying to access it. Eventually I replace the CPU with a Ryzen 7600X and thought the menu bugs would go away, but they persisted. It wasn't until I tried running off the AMD built in graphics is when I realized the issue only occurs on the 3060. The problem does go away when hooked up to another monitor and blamed the old TV I was using. Even Dawid Does Tech ran into problems. The days of Nvidia having better drivers than AMD are gone.
View attachment 721962

View: https://youtu.be/pOv7QbRp89c?si=9CEY-bmKFfF6krXV

You changed the CPU on a Z170 from a 6600K to a 7600X? And thought the BIOS menu corruption would go away?

No offense, but nothing you said is lining up.

 

[GoldenTiger]

The days of Nvidia having better drivers than AMD are gone.

One bad patch of Nvidia's drivers is hardly as bad as amd ones almost constantly are.

 

[ChadD]

One bad patch of Nvidia's drivers is hardly as bad as amd ones almost constantly are.

Which AMD issues would those be?
Granted I ditched my last windows gaming partition some time ago. But hadn't had any real issues for years. My wive is still rocking windows 10, she hasn't had any AMD driver issues in years either. Granted she plays Sims more then anything... and the most demanding things she'll fire up is anno. Still rock solid.

I know Nvidia has been solid for a long time. I don't know what has been going on the last few updates. I am not sure if its just some randomly timed bad luck, or if fixes they have been putting in for blackwell parts are causing issues? Not sure what is up, but clearly the state of Nvidia drivers is currently changed.

 

[Domingo]

The last 2-3 drivers are the only ones I've had issues with in ages, but they've been acting up for several months. Pretty much since the 50-series rolled out and the Nvidia App got fully fleshed out. I can't even tell you the last time I got a video card specific crash, but it's happened with these.

No clue about AMD these days, but they used to be messy in the days when they were directly competing with Nvidia on the high end. Stutters, missing/incorrect refresh rates in major AAA titles, bloat, and sometimes even just a sloooooow release schedule. You'd be lucky to get 3 releases a year. Drivers and Nvidia proprietary tech always used to be the differentiators.

 

[DukenukemX]

You changed the CPU on a Z170 from a 6600K to a 7600X? And thought the BIOS menu corruption would go away?

No offense, but nothing you said is lining up.

The motherboard has issues besides that.

One bad patch of Nvidia's drivers is hardly as bad as amd ones almost constantly are.

What constant issues are you talking about? Last time I ran into an AMD driver issue was when I got my Vega 56 back in 2019. All stability problems have long been fixed. The RTX 3060 isn't even a new GPU. The bios issue I ran into isn't even using drivers, since Windows wasn't even booted. I know you're the equivalent of ChatGPT here but you gotta switch over to Deepseek there buddy. The things you try to make points with might actually line up.

 

[ZeroBarrier]

Which AMD issues would those be?
Granted I ditched my last windows gaming partition some time ago. But hadn't had any real issues for years. My wive is still rocking windows 10, she hasn't had any AMD driver issues in years either. Granted she plays Sims more then anything... and the most demanding things she'll fire up is anno. Still rock solid.

I know Nvidia has been solid for a long time. I don't know what has been going on the last few updates. I am not sure if its just some randomly timed bad luck, or if fixes they have been putting in for blackwell parts are causing issues? Not sure what is up, but clearly the state of Nvidia drivers is currently changed.

Did we already forget about the Radeon 6000 series having black screen issues for 2 years or so?

 

[rinaldo00]

What CPU have you heard that's called a Z170? Did we all forget the Intel Z170 motherboard chipset? Worst part is that two people upvoted your post, and of course GoldenTiger was one of them.

I think he is wondering, as I am, if you suspected BIOS issues why you didn't change the MB.

 

[ChadD]

I think he is wondering, as I am, if you suspected BIOS issues why you didn't change the MB.

Would it not be implied that retiring the 10 year old intel chip for a newer AMD chip would involve a MOBO change? Clearly he changed the mother board.

 

[ChadD]

Did we already forget about the Radeon 6000 series having black screen issues for 2 years or so?

Didn't forget at all. No. Was an issue for a small number of people for a few months, till AMD fixed the driver.. I assume it was related to freesync. It was fixable by disabling freesync. Though it didn't effect everyone, I also seem to remember most people reporting issues had questionable freesync montiors. My guess is some of those monitors didn't quite handle the low end of the free sync range properly and frame dips could cause black screens.

Incidentally I have a feeling in the end that is going to be part of the issue with this Nvidia issue as well. The advantage of freesync is its cheap for MFGs to implement. The disadvantage clearly is how poorly some of them do that. It sounds like at least part of the current Nvidia issues are related to people using gsync comptabile freesync monitors. I wouldn't doubt its some form of the same thing. Perahps the 5000 cards seem to get hit by it more then the 4000s for no other reason then the blackwell cards terrible 0.1% frame time spikes. Those cards all seem to have sharp short dips in frame rate. Perahps when they experience that and dip into say sub 45fps (the low end of most Freesync setups) the iffy Freesync / Gsync compatible implementations black screen. I mean free sync premium is supposed to implement low frame rate compensation. The only not so sure on my theory is apparnetly this is also effecting some people with some actual GSync chipped monitors as well. (though I am not sure how militant Nvidia has been with the use of their GSync logo anymore... I don't think they can charge what they once did and may have relaxed their approval methods)

Be interesting to see if we ever hear what exactly is causing the issue.

 

[DukenukemX]

I think he is wondering, as I am, if you suspected BIOS issues why you didn't change the MB.

The Z170 motherboard had issues like forgetting bios settings. Yes, I did replace the 2032 battery. I thought the corrupted bios screen was the fault of the motherboard. Turns out it was the RTX 3060. Also, it's nearly 10 years old. This was a hand me down of a hand me down computer. Nephew wanted something newer and he got upgrades.

Did we already forget about the Radeon 6000 series having black screen issues for 2 years or so?

Nvidia has had their fair share of stability issues in the past. The issues I'm dealing with are now, with a GPU from 4 years ago. Clearly Nvidia has been having issues, but everyone ignored it because Nvidia doesn't make bad products. I blamed the Z170 motherboard over the RTX 3060 because even I thought there's no way the issues was Nvidia.

 

[rinaldo00]

The Z170 motherboard had issues like forgetting bios settings. Yes, I did replace the 2032 battery. I thought the corrupted bios screen was the fault of the motherboard. Turns out it was the RTX 3060. Also, it's nearly 10 years old. This was a hand me down of a hand me down computer. Nephew wanted something newer and he got upgrades.

I believe it was the 3060, you just should have talked about the MB changes before you talked about changing the CPU. It seemed out of order.

 

[ChadD]

I believe it was the 3060, you just should have talked about the MB changes before you talked about changing the CPU. It seemed out of order.

Again why? It should be implied he isn't running a AMD CPU in a Intel MOBO.

 

[rinaldo00]

Again why? It should be implied he isn't running a AMD CPU in a Intel MOBO.

He said this
". Got my nephew a RTX 3060 for Christmas but was having issues and thought nothing of it since he was running a Z170 with 6600K, and blamed it on the motherboard. Particularly the BIOS menu would corrupt when trying to access it."

So he blamed it on the MB (his words not mine), then changed the CPU.

 

[ChadD]

He said this
". Got my nephew a RTX 3060 for Christmas but was having issues and thought nothing of it since he was running a Z170 with 6600K, and blamed it on the motherboard. Particularly the BIOS menu would corrupt when trying to access it."

So he blamed it on the MB (his words not mine), then changed the CPU.

RIGHT... cause going and buying a new mother board for a 10 year old CPU would be really really really fucking stupid. So he upgraded the kid to a modern AMD CPU. Which would logically require a new mother board. I mean we are all old school [H] folk around here aren't we? Obviously he changed the mother board.

"Eventually I replace the CPU with a Ryzen 7600X...." OK clearly his nephew bought or he bought for his nephew a new AM5 board. Pretty obvious clear logic train here. What is confusing and Its not Dukes fault is the 3080 still having odd glitches in the bios on a new system. Though he says it was resolved when he changed the monitor. Its very strange but then Nvidia does odd things now with their drivers and firmware talking... SO I wonder if their firmware has a remember last monitor state/refresh type and so on that persists without the OS loaded. Seems logical. His issue if he reports it might actually help Nvidia perhaps. Might narrow it down if its something with the hand off of refresh settings to the cards on board firmware. Nvidia cards have their own proprietary Risc-V chips, they have been using since they replaced their on board falcon processors can't remember was it 2000 series?

Anyway based on Nukes issue I wonder if the on board Risc firmware controller is screwing something up when it saves the last good monitor save state. This would also explain why unplugging the monitors and changing the ports may sometimes fix things. Perhaps there is a bug in the way it saves data to Port 1(or more likely port 2 as many issues seem to relate to dual monitor setups)... and if you use the wrong/right type of monitor the value string it stores refresh rates in or something stores the data in a messed up way or something. It might be a really simple fix if Nvidia looks there? Maybe. Also could be responsible for the random black screen blips people are experiencing. Perhaps the driver talks to the firmware and has it store the refresh data... and the fix is as simple as telling it Adaptive Sync detected... min setting instead of being 45.0 needs ot be bumped to 45.2 or 46hz, if the monitor doesn't report it supports low frame rate compensation. Its like when we set our frame limiters to 1FPS over the min and 1 shy of our max to avoid studers.

 

[DukenukemX]

He said this
". Got my nephew a RTX 3060 for Christmas but was having issues and thought nothing of it since he was running a Z170 with 6600K, and blamed it on the motherboard. Particularly the BIOS menu would corrupt when trying to access it."

So he blamed it on the MB (his words not mine), then changed the CPU.

It's not hard to understand that new CPU = new motherboard. It's not like this was an AMD to AMD, but Intel to AMD. Should I mention the ram was replaced, because that's a given as well.

 

[ChadD]

It's not hard to understand that new CPU = new motherboard. It's not like this was an AMD to AMD, but Intel to AMD. Should I mention the ram was replaced, because that's a given as well.

Interestingly though... you did discover something very important. You had graphical glitches in the bios. On both systems. I assume you plugged the monitor into the same GPU port when you upgraded?
Sure sounds like by doing that you have narrowed down the issue to GPU firmware. I bet its a last monitor state load issue on the firmware. Card remembered the Fd up settings even in a new system. I'm sure its all related to settings the driver is telling the firmware to store for freesync support.

 

[kalston]

Did we already forget about the Radeon 6000 series having black screen issues for 2 years or so?

Or 7000 GPUs not running VR properly for almost a full year. There's more but anyway yeah, nvidia doesn't care too much about gamers anymore, so no surprises driver quality goes down too.

I can't say I've had any actual nvidia issue on my rig thus far, even with latest drivers, but I'm on 4000 not 5000 series, could be why. Or it's just because I have a simple setup, single monitor, no overlays or auto HDR etc.

 

[Conman]

I wonder how much of the driver team got shifted over to AI?

 

[TheHig]

I’m down to a 3060 and a 4070 super in the Nvidia camp and have not experienced any issues. I have not updated the drivers to any version that support the 5000 series however. Also I don’t use frame gen or have any gsync monitors so just slumming it with dlss if the game supports it and it’s needed .

Full time PC is all AMD at the moment and everything I do with it is working fine. BUT I do have an AsRock board and 9800x3d in that one so time bomb? Who knows..

Anyway all manufacturers have some dodgy drivers or issues periodically so just see what works for your set up and gut it out. They usually get fixed eventually…

Still not touching the 5000 series though. I think Nvidia has a rare miss here and would suggest waiting for the next one.

 

[criccio]

Had to move to 566.36 last week to bring some stability back to Assassin's Creed Shadows. Since then, smooth sailing. All the same symptoms Steve discussed here, most notably just random reboots. All gone.

Many DDU attempts with the latest driver but this was the only solution.

 

[1_rick]

572 started making Minecraft crash while my computer (RTX 4070) was asleep. Annoyingly, removing that version and installing 566, which is the recommended advice, only reduced the frequency of that, so now I guess I have to DDU.

 

[1_rick]

Also I don’t use frame gen or have any gsync monitors so just slumming it with dlss if the game supports it and it’s needed

I upgraded to 572 to try the HL2 RTX remix, and that's when my troubles started.

 

[Sir Beregond]

One bad patch of Nvidia's drivers is hardly as bad as amd ones almost constantly are.

One? You mean the last several since January? Here let me count....Six actually. These devs are suggesting to rollback to 566.36 from Dec 10, 2024. That is six Game Ready driver releases ago. And doesn't help you at all if you are on a 50-series card.

Also this is a tired trope. AMD drivers of today isn't the GCN, Vega, and RDNA1 era. Honestly everyone I know with a modern AMD card since RDNA2 hasn't complained much at all about drivers. Nvidia certainly had the more solid drivers during this era and I think up until 2025. What the hell have they been doing since January?

It's easy to just brush this off as "one mistake" like you did, but it's another thing to add to the list of what keeps going wrong with GeForce since the 50-series launch started.

I keep having a game crash on my 3080 Ti I can't figure out. I'm starting to wonder if newer drivers are the culprit.

 

[Ididar]

Had to move to 566.36 last week to bring some stability back to Assassin's Creed Shadows. Since then, smooth sailing. All the same symptoms Steve discussed here, most notably just random reboots. All gone.

Many DDU attempts with the latest driver but this was the only solution.

My 4070 with the latest drivers isn't having an issue. No unexpected crashes at all. I've been blindly updated my nVidia drivers across multiple video cards for ... well ... I can't recall. Probably a decade. It is a very rare thing for them to have driver issues that affect large numbers of people. Not never, but rare. Compared to the olden days, we're living in a golden age of video card drivers. My god the shit we used to have to deal with 15-20 years ago was sometimes dreadful. So many people today don't realize how bad things used to be and how rock solid stable things are today by comparison.

 

[Brackle]

One bad patch of Nvidia's drivers is hardly as bad as amd ones almost constantly are.

It has been 6 driver releases. Not just one. It is happening on the 3000/4000 (I can confirm) and the 5000 series. Sure not everyone is having the issues, but quite a bit are having these issues.

That Ironwall Nvidia mindshare is slowly going away. Nvidia needs to get off its ass and fix this shit.

 

[rinaldo00]

RIGHT... cause going and buying a new mother board for a 10 year old CPU would be really really really fucking stupid. So he upgraded the kid to a modern AMD CPU. Which would logically require a new mother board. I mean we are all old school [H] folk around here aren't we? Obviously he changed the mother board.

"Eventually I replace the CPU with a Ryzen 7600X...." OK clearly his nephew bought or he bought for his nephew a new AM5 board.

Ah ok, I screwed up. I now re-read his post and see he said "Ryzen 7600X" I read the post too fast and thought that he went from an i5-6600K to an i5-7600K. These companies keep changing SKU numbers to match each other' naming schemes. Well, you gotta admit that I was correct that he replaced the MB

 

[Dan_D]

So far I haven't had any issues with NVIDIA's drivers on the 5090. But I've only played three or four different games since I got it.

 

[rinaldo00]

It's not hard to understand that new CPU = new motherboard. It's not like this was an AMD to AMD, but Intel to AMD. Should I mention the ram was replaced, because that's a given as well.

Ah ok, I screwed up. I now re-read your post and see you said "Ryzen 7600X" I read the post too fast and thought that you went from an i5-6600K to an i5-7600K. These companies keep changing SKU numbers to match each other' naming schemes. Well, you gotta admit that I was correct that you replaced the MB

 

[Shotglass01]

Had to move to 566.36 last week to bring some stability back to Assassin's Creed Shadows. Since then, smooth sailing. All the same symptoms Steve discussed here, most notably just random reboots. All gone.

Many DDU attempts with the latest driver but this was the only solution.

Same here. 'Downgraded' to 566.36 due to PoE2 issues. But used DDU right off the bat to get rid of the 57x.xx driver I had loaded. It's hard to tell sometimes if it's PoE or the driver. But last play, crashed once instead of 3 or 4 times. 4080S.

 

[StryderxX]

I've run into a few of these driver issues with my 5090. I've had the game crash and reboot issue with Cyberpunk 2077. That went away once I disabled Gsync for that game in the Nvidia control panel. I'm still having issues with white screen flashes on the desktop if HDR is enabled. Super annoying. Patiently waiting for Nvidia to fix this mess.

 

[ChadD]

Ah ok, I screwed up. I now re-read his post and see he said "Ryzen 7600X" I read the post too fast and thought that he went from an i5-6600K to an i5-7600K. These companies keep changing SKU numbers to match each other' naming schemes. Well, you gotta admit that I was correct that he replaced the MB

I can see that mistake. It really is annoying how many recycled numbers and letters there are. AMD now releasing GPUs with Nvidia style naming. I cringe thinking where AMD goes with 10k parts now for CPU and GPUs R9-10950x ; RX-10070 XT? You just know someone in marketing is going to convince them to do something stupid. They can't replicate the Intel string of numbers and letter gibirish right? They will.

 

[kac77]

Did we already forget about the Radeon 6000 series having black screen issues for 2 years or so?

If you mean RDNA2 then no. I did run into an annoyance with my settings being reset upon installation of a new driver, but other than that it (6600) was solid. No crashes and that was connected to a TV and was the main gaming card for quite some time. It was then replaced with a 6950... no issues.

 

[Decko]

The motherboard has issues besides that.

What constant issues are you talking about? Last time I ran into an AMD driver issue was when I got my Vega 56 back in 2019. All stability problems have long been fixed. The RTX 3060 isn't even a new GPU. The bios issue I ran into isn't even using drivers, since Windows wasn't even booted. I know you're the equivalent of ChatGPT here but you gotta switch over to Deepseek there buddy. The things you try to make points with might actually line up.

Yeah I haven't had a bad experience with AMD since the RX 5700 I had in 2019? I got blackscreens with that once a day playing. The 6000, 7000 and now 9000 have all be rock solid for me personally. I think there's some issues with older games, I know I've heard about people having poor performance in WoW for example. But I think under most circumstances they work exceedingly well now. The RX 5700 was so bad I switched to a 3060 ti as quickly as I could (managed to get one at launch on newegg).

 

[Ranulfo]

Given the various reports I've seen for two months now, I wouldn't use new drivers from Jan 30th onward unless a new game requires it, if you are on 40-series and older. Interesting to see game devs recommending drivers back to Nov/December too. I have no problems on my 2060S but I'm running last August drivers.

Paranoia made me go download older drivers from Nvidia the other day though, just to make sure I had some versions from Oct/November last year.

 

[DukenukemX]

Interestingly though... you did discover something very important. You had graphical glitches in the bios. On both systems. I assume you plugged the monitor into the same GPU port when you upgraded?

The RTX 3060 has only once HDMI and the TV I used was old. It wasn't until I brought the computer to him and plugged it in again to the same HDMI port is when I realized the RTX 3060 didn't like the TV. The built in AMD GPU had no issues.

Sure sounds like by doing that you have narrowed down the issue to GPU firmware. I bet its a last monitor state load issue on the firmware. Card remembered the Fd up settings even in a new system. I'm sure its all related to settings the driver is telling the firmware to store for freesync support.

I thought about flashing another firmware to the RTX 3060, but when I looked up what versions were available on TechPowerUp, I realized the firmware on the card was newer. Since the problem goes away using his monitor, I figured I'd just ignore the problem.

 

[DukenukemX]

Yeah I haven't had a bad experience with AMD since the RX 5700 I had in 2019? I got blackscreens with that once a day playing. The 6000, 7000 and now 9000 have all be rock solid for me personally.

When I got my Vega 56 back in 2019, I had stability issues. I was very active on AMD's forum to try and solve the problem. It wasn't until another year later when I decided to upgrade the ram in my PC is when I realized the ram was bad. I bought used ram at the time, because ram prices were insane. When ram prices got better, I replaced 4x sticks of Corsair ram with 2x sticks of Gskill and problems were gone. Corsair was nice enough to even replace the ram but with slightly higher latency, which I didn't care. That ram is now in my living room PC. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the stability issues were caused by AMD drivers being sensitive to unstable PC's. Nvidia drivers maybe more forgiving. Also I had a Creative Sound Card which at the time was known to have issues with Ryzen systems.

I think there's some issues with older games, I know I've heard about people having poor performance in WoW for example. But I think under most circumstances they work exceedingly well now.

That's funny because up until recently I had performance issues in SoD WoW, but I use Linux. Now it runs butter smooth and this happened out of nowhere. The game would stutter so badly. It's not like I had updated the system or anything. Given my history with WoW, I'd blame the game itself. It wasn't like the people I play with weren't also experiencing performance issues, and they used Nvida on Windows.

The RX 5700 was so bad I switched to a 3060 ti as quickly as I could (managed to get one at launch on newegg).

The RX 5700's weren't exactly on my list of GPU's to buy. I heard people with a lot of issues using those cards. I do wonder if those issues have been correct. I wonder if they get correct under Linux especially?

 

[Decko]

When I got my Vega 56 back in 2019, I had stability issues. I was very active on AMD's forum to try and solve the problem. It wasn't until another year later when I decided to upgrade the ram in my PC is when I realized the ram was bad. I bought used ram at the time, because ram prices were insane. When ram prices got better, I replaced 4x sticks of Corsair ram with 2x sticks of Gskill and problems were gone. Corsair was nice enough to even replace the ram but with slightly higher latency, which I didn't care. That ram is now in my living room PC. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of the stability issues were caused by AMD drivers being sensitive to unstable PC's. Nvidia drivers maybe more forgiving. Also I had a Creative Sound Card which at the time was known to have issues with Ryzen systems.

That's funny because up until recently I had performance issues in SoD WoW, but I use Linux. Now it runs butter smooth and this happened out of nowhere. The game would stutter so badly. It's not like I had updated the system or anything. Given my history with WoW, I'd blame the game itself. It wasn't like the people I play with weren't also experiencing performance issues, and they used Nvida on Windows.

The RX 5700's weren't exactly on my list of GPU's to buy. I heard people with a lot of issues using those cards. I do wonder if those issues have been correct. I wonder if they get correct under Linux especially?

The performance thing is just what i've heard from people on reddit, I'm sure there's some truth to it I would imagine most 7900 xtx users are on windows 11 and it does seem like in a lot of instances linux drivers tend to out perform windows. As for the stability of the 5700 series I don't know the answer to that. I can't personally switch to linux due to my job but at some point I'd like to make the switch, but it's currently out of my hands.

 

[Ranulfo]

Given my history with WoW, I'd blame the game itself. It wasn't like the people I play with weren't also experiencing performance issues, and they used Nvida on Windows.

I'd blame WoW first given my experiences with the game over the years. There was that one update that borked everyone back in like 2017. For some reason my fx 8350 handled the performance bug better than far better cpus and gpus. Might have be core/thread count, either way everyone had their fps drop 30-50% in raids with 10-25 people.