Latest GeForce Game Ready Driver reportedly restricts voltage, impacting performance

It looks like NVIDIA has been on a bad run with GeForce Game Ready Driver releases. Earlier this week, we received GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.71 WHQL. This belated update added support for Capcom's Resident Evil Requiem, which was delayed because the initial version (595.59) included a serious bug that affected fan monitoring and even stopped fans from working on some GPUs.

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Well, it seems that GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.71 WHQL is also not without issues, as several users are reporting performance drops that appear to be related to GPU core voltage limitations, causing boost clock speeds to drop below 3,000 MHz or 3 GHz even with a manual overclock applied. This is something we were able to replicate on a GeForce RTX 5080, where a previous 3.0+ GHz overclock was now sitting at sub-3 GHz.

This issue is not only being reported on NVIDIA's forums for the driver release but also on YouTube, where creators are showcasing the performance impact of what looks to be a voltage lock affecting all high-powered GeForce RTX 40 and RTX 50 Series GPUs. In Bang4BuckPC Gamer's video below, we see performance in the Heaven Benchmark running on a GeForce RTX 5090 drop from 183 FPS running driver version 591.74 to 144 FPS on GeForce Game Ready Driver 595.71.

Interestingly, and as expected, the voltage and boost clock speed drop sees the GPU draw less power too, going from around 570W down to 480W. This issue has also been confirmed by X user Sebastian Castellanos, who is playing Resident Evil Requiem with path tracing enabled and DLSS 4 and Frame Generation enabled in 1440p. There, the performance drops from 133 FPS with an older driver to 79 FPS with the latest release.

With multiple reports of this issue, NVIDIA has yet to provide a statement. Hopefully, this is something that can be fixed with a quick hotfix update.