NVIDIA has just pushed out a new hotfix driver, which tackles the issues with Alan Wake 2 and its stability and performance degradation in the form of the GeForce Game Ready 546.08 Hotfix drivers.
We see hotfix drivers over time, with NVIDIA engineers finding an issue in its drivers that is something important -- in this case, issues with Alan Wake 2, which shines on GeForce RTX series GPUs -- and so we get a quicker hotfix driver release. We will see a WHQL release in the coming days if you don't like using hotfix drivers.
The only issue in games that these new GeForce Game Ready 546.08 Hotfix drivers fix is Alan Wake 2, so if you're using a GeForce GPU and featuring any stability and performance issues, then you'll want to use these hotfix drivers. You can download the new GeForce Game Ready 546.08 Hotfix drivers here (669MB download).
"A GeForce driver is an incredibly complex piece of software, We have an army of software engineers constantly adding features and fixing bugs. These changes are checked into the main driver branches, which are eventually run through a massive QA process and released".
"Since we have so many changes being checked in, we usually try to align driver releases with significant game or product releases. This process has served us pretty well over the years but it has one significant weakness. Sometimes a change that is important to many users might end up sitting and waiting until we are able to release the driver".
"The GeForce Hotfix driver is our way to trying to get some of these fixes out to you more quickly. These drivers are basically the same as the previous released version, with a small number of additional targeted fixes. The fixes that make it in are based in part on your feedback in the Driver Feedback threads and partly on how realistic it is for us to quickly address them. These fixes (and many more) will be incorporated into the next official driver release, at which time the Hotfix driver will be taken down."