NVIDIA is still investigating RTX 5000 GPU black screen crashes, which may require a BIOS fix

NVIDIA has given us an update on the issue with black screens that has been plaguing a number of folks who've purchased a new Blackwell GPU.

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It seems this bug can affect older RTX 4000 (or even RTX 3000) GPUs too (Image Credit: NVIDIA)

These black screen bug check crashes have been happening on RTX 5090 and 5080 graphics cards since the launch of these GPUs a while back.

NVIDIA said it was going to investigate this bug when reports of problems first emerged earlier this month, and an admin over at NVIDIA's GeForce forums has just provided an update, stating:

"We are still actively investigating this issue. I don't know if a fix will come as a driver update or VBIOS update so I haven't added it to the list. Once I have further info, I'll make sure to share it with the community."

Clearly enough, there's still some uncertainty as to the root cause, and whether any fix might be able to be wrapped in a future graphics driver - or whether it'll require a BIOS patch of some kind.

As mentioned, this is an issue that is being encountered by RTX 5090 and 5080 owners, but we've also seen scattered reports from those who've just bought the freshly released RTX 5070 Ti. That was with the latest NVIDIA driver, version 572.47 (note that these bugs were first encountered with the release of version 572.16).

Worryingly, there are also reports of this happening not just to Blackwell GPUs, but to older RTX 4000 or 3000 graphics cards in some cases, since the release of the v572.16 driver. (And some of those black screens aren't just crashes with the PC freezing up, they're rendering the system unable to boot - nasty).

A fair number of workarounds have been suggested at this point, which again hints at the complexity of the bug here. If you can't roll back to older drivers, one possible cure is to drop the refresh rate of your monitor to 60Hz (maybe not ideal, but better than crashing all the time). Or you could try dropping your Blackwell GPU back from using PCIe 5.0 to PCIe 4.0 (ditto on the not ideal front).

Otherwise, you can sit tight and hope NVIDIA is getting on top of this one, and that we'll receive a more detailed analysis of the problem - and the resolution - soon enough.

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