NVIDIA GPUs continue to face driver woes as RTX 5000 launch is called 'absolutely abhorrent'

NVIDIA is continuing to face a whole lot of flak over the problems its more recent graphics drivers have been causing.

Gamers Nexus is the latest to highlight driver instability issues with NVIDIA GPUs (VideoCardz brought word of the latest YouTube video from the channel, which you can see above).

To summarize, Gamers Nexus highlights a whole bunch of crashes, such as Marvel Rivals which saw the PC lock up (with a familiar black screen) after turning on frame generation. Other titles exhibited this behavior, too, when using what many PC gamers are now referring to as 'fake frames' of course.

Cyberpunk 2077 crashes are also shown (the game won't actually start up in this case), along with similar happenings in Shadow of the Tomb Raider (and screen distortion, too).

These problems are being encountered with more recent post-Blackwell graphics drivers, and as Gamers Nexus points out, even some game developers are now recommending that you use older drivers with some NVIDIA GPUs. (Example advice shown from the developers of The First Berserker: Khazan and Inzoi recommends that RTX 4000 owners should be using the GeForce driver from December 2024, and not a release from this year).

Windows Latest also just flagged up a lot of reports of problems, including full-on crashes, with NVIDIA's Game Ready Driver version 572.83. This is affecting RTX 5000 owners (RTX 5070 Ti, 5080, 5090) as well as RTX 4000 as already noted, and in some cases, even RTX 3000 GPUs.

Tricky to know where to even start

The problem is that there are a whole bunch of issues across a wide swathe of different PC configurations and games - so many that it's difficult to know where to start in terms of addressing potential troubleshooting measures.

However, it's worth turning off some features to see if this helps, and that includes DLSS 4 and frame generation, or indeed G-Sync.

But the general advice, for now, while we wait for NVIDIA to get its GeForce house in order, is to revert to an older driver version if you're having a lot of problems.

Of course, that could be difficult if you need a newer driver release, due to it supporting your Blackwell GPU, or a new game that you're playing. In that case, you're kind of between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Gamers Nexus calls the Blackwell launch an "absolutely abhorrent and completely embarrassing" affair for NVIDIA, with the YouTube channel certainly pulling no punches. Clearly, it has been far less than ideal, not just in terms of wonky drivers, but GPU availability and resultant pricing to boot.

NVIDIA has got some recovering to do, in short, and with the RTX 5060 Ti apparently on the horizon for next week, a lot of gamers are going to be watching stock levels there - as well as hoping for driver fixes in short order.

The issue is that as noted, the bugs in the works of NVIDIA's graphics driver seem to be causing chaos in so many different ways that it doesn't feel like solutions are going to come easy here. A long road to recovery (and hopefully not to ruin) lies ahead, it would seem.

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