NVIDIA's investigating FPS drops and visual glitches with its GPUs related to Windows 11 update

It seems that the January update is seriously problematic for NVIDIA GPUs in some cases, with reports of black screens, FPS drops, and more besides.

NVIDIA's investigating FPS drops and visual glitches with its GPUs related to Windows 11 update
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Tech Reporter
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TL;DR: NVIDIA is looking into reported issues with Windows 11 and its GeForce GPUs seemingly caused by the January 2026 update for the OS. These problems include screen flickering, black screens, visual corruption, and frame rate drops (although the black screen bug has been fixed with the new preview update for Microsoft's OS).

NVIDIA has said that it's now looking into problems with its GeForce GPUs caused by the most recent update for Windows 11.

NVIDIA is looking into bugs which aren't caused by its GPU driver, but seemingly the latest Windows 11 update (Image Credit: NVIDIA)
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NVIDIA is looking into bugs which aren't caused by its GPU driver, but seemingly the latest Windows 11 update (Image Credit: NVIDIA)

Windows Latest reports that the January update for Windows 11 is visiting a bunch of glitches on gamers with NVIDIA graphics cards, which includes nasty instances of screen flickering, and being treated to black screen stalls before the desktop eventually appears on boot (or when games are loading).

There's also evidence of visual corruption in some games (Forza Horizon 5 being an example), and other reports point to stuttering in games, and frame rate drops to the tune of 10 to 20 FPS.

These complaints are being seen across both Microsoft's Feedback Hub and NVIDIA's GeForce forums, and on the latter, an admin, Manuel, has replied to one of the pieces of feedback.

Manuel noted of the issue raised: "Even though it started after a Windows 11 update, we are looking into it. As far as I know, the only way to resolve it appears to be uninstalling KB5074109."

So, the admin is making it clear this is not an issue with NVIDIA's GPU driver, but is a problem on Microsoft's side - but nonetheless, Team Green is investigating, presumably to see if it can lend a hand with the solution.

Note that the black screen issues may be cured by applying patch KB5074105, the preview (optional) update which was deployed after the January update (KB5074109) - but the other mentioned problems aren't fixed with that release.

Windows 11 is off to a pretty terrible start to the year in terms of the number of bugs coming through. Let's hope that the February update, which arrives next week (and is in preview now, as KB5074105), has a cleaner bill of health for glitches than this last patch.