NVIDIA's fixed black screen crashes with RTX 5000 GPUs, but some cards will need a BIOS update

Those who've been pulling out their hair over black screen crashes with NVIDIA's new Blackwell GPUs can breathe a sigh of relief - the fix is imminent, or indeed has actually already arrived for some.

VideoCardz noticed that the owner of an RTX 5090 (MSI Gaming Trio) suffering at the hands of black screen aggro posted in the NVIDIA subreddit to advise others that a BIOS update had been provided by MSI packing the fix.

So, the solution requires patching the BIOS after all, you may be thinking? As NVIDIA wasn't sure about that previously, but it turns out that actually, you may - or may not - need a BIOS update.

According to an NVIDIA rep on Reddit who replied to the above post, those Blackwell owners whose GPU hasn't received a BIOS patch will instead get a cure with NVIDIA's new driver coming later this week.

Obviously, having the fix bundled in the driver is a neater (less risky) solution, but for those who need to apply a BIOS update, well, you'll just have to bite the bullet. It'll hopefully be a lot less frustrating than staring at black screens for much more of your gaming (or computing) life than is ideal.

Looking at the comments in the Reddit thread, it seems this fix is working for some, though there are scattered reports of it not doing the trick (or stamping out most crashes, but not quite all of them - which is still an improvement, obviously).

We'll have to wait and see what other Blackwell GPU owners come back with in the way of feedback before being able to judge the success level here.