Get It Together, NVIDIA | Terrible GPU Driver Stability
jimmy_thang
April 14, 2025
We investigate whether NVIDIA’s new drivers are behind the recent GPU instability issues
The Highlights
- We read through numerous user reports and set forth to replicate NVIDIA’s stability problems
- NVIDIA has major driver instability problems right now, and that impacts newer RTX 50 series cards as well as RTX 40 and 30 series GPUs
- We found issues with setups using DLSS4, frame generation, G-Sync, and even just the monitor ports in a multi-monitor setup
Table of Contents
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Intro
How the tables have turned. NVIDIA, is now playing the role of AMD circa Vega, which is not good. NVIDIA’s drivers have had stability problems since the launch of its RTX 50 series GPUs and we’ve been able to replicate them.
In one game, we had system crashes after enabling NVIDIA’s frame generation, which is unfortunate since it marketed the 50-series on the back of MFG and fake frames. We had reboots loading into Cyberpunk, crashes and driver errors in Tomb Raider, and issues with screen distortion and artifacting.
Editor's note: This was originally published on April 6, 2025 as a video. This content has been adapted to written format for this article and is unchanged from the original publication.
Credits
Test Lead, Host, Writing
Steve Burke
Camera, Video Editing
Vitalii Makhnovets
Testing, Writing, Research
Tannen Williams
Writing, Web Editing
Jimmy Thang
But these issues didn’t show up in our review of the 50-series, which was our first hint that it’s related to a driver version issue.
Game developers have recently begun recommending rolling back to older NVIDIA drivers:
inZOI, the studio which NVIDIA has heavily promoted for partnership with its AI features, threw NVIDIA under the bus, stating, “Using driver versions 572.xx or later may result in occasional frame drops or stuttering [...] If issues persist, we recommend installing version 566.36.” This driver is from December.
Developer Neople stated, “Using driver versions 572.xx or later may result in occasional frame drops or stuttering.”
This aligns with our findings from the past week, where we’ve been trying to replicate these issues that have been widely reported online.
Interestingly, we found that the order of the monitors in Windows, as in the display out order of monitor 1 and monitor 2 in the OS via the actual hardware connection to the video card, seemed to affect stability.
User reports commonly note various display problems like black screens, flickering, and sometimes even unprompted system reboots and crashes to desktop. This includes other types of crashes too, like crashing to desktop. Upon a closer inspection, it wasn’t only 50-series users dealing with the issues. Many users of NVIDIA’s previous generations of GPUs, particularly the 40 and 30 series, are also affected by the recent drivers.
Several users speculated on the impact of multiple monitors, the impact of mixed or higher refresh rates, and even how NVIDIA’s own G-Sync might be affecting the driver stability.
There’s been at least one megathread on Reddit with hundreds of reports and these issues have been in the news since the launch of the 50-series.
We’ve been able to replicate these issues and have isolated some of the causes. We also have some stopgap solutions. They’re not great, but may help for the time being. This also applies to multiple card generations. As far as we know, it impacts the 30 to 50 series GPUs.
User reports seem to point to driver 566.36 as the most stable recent driver.
This version was released on December 5th, 2024, just prior to the 50 series launch in January. In the four months since that driver’s release, NVIDIA has posted six GeForce Game Ready Drivers and at least four GeForce “Hotfix” Drivers specifically aimed at fixing bugs and system crashes.
Testing Configuration
Time to get into our testing configuration.
In order to better understand the driver problems that previous generation NVIDIA users are currently experiencing, we attempted to recreate some of the issues ourselves.
Before we began, we went through an assortment of user reports to find games, system configurations, and specific settings that seemed especially problematic to get a starting point for our testing.
For our testbench setup, we used a modified version of our standard test bench. We also bought a couple games that people had particular issues with. Our standard GPU review bench did not exhibit any of the issues with drivers initially, so we modified it.
Components included these:
- CPU: 9800X3D
- GPU: 4070 Super
- Monitors: Dual-monitor setup using an Acer 4K 60Hz monitor (not G-Sync compatible) and a Dell Alienware 1080p 360Hz monitor that is G-Sync compatible, which we ran at 240Hz. Both were connected via DisplayPort. And this part is important: In Windows, we manually set the monitor order:
- Monitor 1: Acer 4K display
- Monitor 2: Alienware monitor, which was checked as the main display in the Windows settings).
- Motherboard: ASUS ROG X670E Hero
- RAM: 2x16GB (32) of DDR5 6,000Mhz Trident Z5
- PSU: EVGA 1600 T2
- Driver version: We used 572.83 initially as it was the most recent when we began our testing, which was released on March 18th, 2025
So we have a very intentional mix of different resolution displays, different G-Sync compatibility, different refresh rates, and, of course, we’re going to change the drivers as we go through our testing.
Our first goal was to simply identify a game crashing. From there, we’d recollect what occurred leading up to the failure and then document a process that we could follow to ensure the crash happened every time. Once we were able to consistently reproduce the complication, we’d change one variable at a time while keeping all others the same in order to isolate the factors involved and determine possible causes. For each instance, we separately disabled G-Sync, frame generation, DLSS, and sometimes other settings (depending on the game). We also moved to a single monitor and then swapped output ports on the GPU between the two monitors for each game issue we experienced. Suffice it to say, this all took a while.
Broad Findings
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Here’s what we found:
In our testing on NVIDIA’s most recent driver, 572.83, we found four different instances of game crashes that could be consistently reproduced.
In Star Wars Outlaws, we experienced failures after selecting “resume” in the startup menu. In Marvel Rivals, we’d observe system reboots either directly after applying frame generation in the pre-menu settings, or after applying the settings and then exiting to desktop from a match.
In Cyberpunk 2077, we encountered reboots when loading into the game.
In Shadow of the Tomb Raider, when running the in-game benchmark we faced a game crash along with a driver error. After rolling back to a previous driver, we could no longer replicate any of these same failures on any of these games. And that’s the reason this took a week or 2 to put together because we tried to isolate to see if it was a game problem, something relating to NVIDIA, or NVIDIA settings in that game.
Based on our initial findings, we believed the driver issues may be affecting some users that are operating on a specific combination of hardware and displays/graphics settings. Specifically, those using two monitors with G-Sync and frame gen enabled. We also found something really interesting regarding the physical output ports on the GPU itself and how the monitors are identified in Windows display settings. We don’t fully understand it yet, but we’ll go over that observation shortly.
We have more findings to go over first.
Less Conclusive Findings
DLSS and Reflex may also factor into the equation, but unfortunately we weren’t able to make a clear determination. In some games, DLSS or Reflex is automatically enabled when using frame gen. Meaning, we weren’t always able to fully isolate each of these variables because one will force the other. Additionally, sometimes lowering the refresh rate to 120Hz on our second monitor would resolve issues, while other times it didn’t.
Something that especially stood out to us was that we could only replicate 3 of the 4 failures when both monitors were connected via DisplayPort and when monitor 2 was checked as the main display in Windows settings.
As seen in the image above, when our Acer monitor was plugged into what we’re calling slot 3 and our Alienware monitor was plugged into what we’re calling slot 2, we didn’t have any issues. But when we swapped the slots the monitors plugged into, effectively converting “monitor 1” to “monitor 2” within Windows and vice versa, and then made monitor 2 the main display, we saw the crashes again consistently.
This is less to do with the physical ports being used and more to do with how Windows and the drivers are treating the monitors in their “1” and “2” slots. We couldn’t tell you why this behavior causes issues, but if you’re having trouble, swapping monitors 1 and 2 could potentially help.
We actually found this by accident. The day after we recorded our first game crash, we reconfigured the bench and began trying to trigger it again, but couldn’t. It wasn’t until we realized that the only difference was that the DP output slots on the GPU had been changed. After switching them back to the original position, we were suddenly able to observe the failure again. To our surprise, this same circumstance appeared in multiple games.
Game Crashes
As for similarities between the issues: In Star Wars Outlaws, Marvel Rivals, and Cyberpunk 2077 (all games that natively support DLSS 4), we were unable to produce a failure when either G-Sync or frame gen were disabled. We also separately couldn’t trigger a crash after swapping output slots or on a single monitor setup.
DLSS 4 and frame gen are also problems here. It’s not just the monitor order or the monitor ports.
The error in Shadow of the Tomb Raider was different from the games previously discussed. This game was unaffected by G-Sync. It also doesn’t feature a frame gen setting (at least the version we tested doesn’t). Additionally, it experienced the same failures on a single monitor and after swapping output slots. So none of the other issues we’ve talked about thus far were the cause for Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Instead, we were able to boil this problem down to having “RTX Shadow Quality” set to Ultra in the in-game settings. And we know for a fact that this didn’t always cause a crash because we have run tests on it with RTX Shadow Quality set to Ultra in prior versions of our benchmark suite with different drivers.
In regards to our analysis, the main commonality between all four of these games is that they crashed on NVIDIA’s most recent drivers at the time of testing, but after rolling back to 566.36, we were no longer able to trigger that same error.
Rolling back to driver version 566.36 doesn’t guarantee that crashes will stop. From what we’ve read online, there are still issues with that driver. In our case, we are unable to prompt the same failures we had previously been able to. This, along with various user reports, seems to suggest that driver 566.36 is currently the most stable driver that NVIDIA has released recently. 566.36 is from December and predates the launch of the RTX 50 series, so would not be compatible with 50-series cards.
There are a lot of other issues reported online, but that’s what we’ve replicated so far.
Many users saw problems in games that didn’t occur until after multiple hours of gameplay. As much as we’d like to, we can’t spend several hours playing a random game to see if it will possibly crash. It’s just too unpredictable. On the same note, just because we weren’t able to repeat our failure when we turned G-Sync or frame gen off, doesn’t mean that turning these options off will solve all problems, but hopefully it’ll help some of you.
Other Common Issues
There were some other issues we commonly saw in our research:
We’ve seen multiple reports that there’s an issue with waking from sleep or resuming from idle states and we were able to create at least one of these by accident. We noticed on one of our personal PCs that there were issues waking the system from sleep when the PC had been idle. And on wake, the monitors appear to turn on but don’t receive any signal and the screens remain black. Fixing this required a PC reboot. Windows has its own decades of issues with sleep and S3 states, so it’s hard to specifically pinpoint who’s at fault for this one between NVIDIA and Microsoft.
Another issue we’ve seen going around has to do with the alt+tab shortcut acting buggy and freezing games when switching windows while playing a game.
We did occasionally encounter this bug, but it wasn’t something we saw every time and seemed to be resolved pretty easily by pressing the Windows key or alt+tabbing back into the game. Again, this one is difficult to pinpoint between NVIDIA and Microsoft.
NVIDIA Driver Notes
NVIDIA has had some driver notes addressing parts of this, despite the driver not fixing everything.
In NVIDIA’s 572.83 driver release notes, one open issue states, “[Cyberpunk 2077/Half-Life 2 RTX] PC may bugcheck with error 0xd1 when playing game while using DLSS Frame Gen + G-SYNC [5144337].”
We’re glad that issues relating to frame gen and G-Sync are being acknowledged, but we’d like to see more from NVIDIA here. This is a relatively vague description and only mentions two games that are affected by this much larger issue.
NVIDIA has also had multiple hot fixes. We’ve reported on some of them where it’s saying it’s trying to fix issues with the original 50 series and then just basically everything.
Suggestions for Those Affected
We’ve known that NVIDIA has shifted its focus towards larger business clients and away from its gaming market. That’s fine -- but it shouldn’t be screwing up areas where it has long had such refinement. NVIDIA is known for its driver stability, and the company, in its series of screwups for 2025, is starting to chip away at that in an era where AMD’s drivers have become relatively stable. These driver issues are another mark upon NVIDIA’s tarnished gaming reputation with the 50-series launch as the company shifts focus, but losing prior-gained ground shouldn’t be in the cards, and NVIDIA hopefully will recognize that these issues are damaging to its long-term brand credibility.
We’ll end off with some suggestions for users experiencing issues:
For non-50 series users who are confronted with game crashes on NVIDIA’s latest drivers, we’d first recommend swapping the order of your display outputs on the GPU itself. We don’t fully understand how effective this fix is yet, but it’s simple and worked for us. We’d also suggest swapping cables to HDMI, which is not ideal, to see if that changes anything as a stopgap.
If you don’t feel strongly about G-Sync or frame generation being enabled, we would then suggest disabling one of those settings and see if you’re able to resolve the issue that way until NVIDIA is able to get its s*** together. Considering NVIDIA’s whole marketing gimmick lately has been frame generation, this is a bad solution for NVIDIA, but hopefully it’s a stopgap.
If neither of the above work for you, our last suggestion would be to rollback to a previous driver. If you’re able to recall a specific driver that you previously used that didn’t cause any problems for you, we’d advise reinstalling that one.
In our case, 566.36 seemed to remedy our problems and seems to be shared by users as one of the more stable ones currently available.
As general process control, we’d recommend installing drivers directly from NVIDIA’s website and disconnecting from the internet for installs and uninstalls. We always uninstall previous drivers using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in safe mode, pause windows updates, and perform a clean install before reconnecting to the internet. It’s not something that we experienced, but we have seen user reports claiming that installing drivers using the NVIDIA App led to certain issues, and reinstalling the same driver but from NVIDIA’s website instead solved those problems.
Conclusion
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Unfortunately, all of these suggestions are only temporary workarounds, and we can only wait for a new NVIDIA driver to provide a legitimate solution and get it together. This has been an absolutely abhorrent and completely embarrassing launch for the company. This is the worst NVIDIA launch we’ve covered and it may be the worst GPU series launch we’ve ever covered. That’s saying a lot considering AMD has had some impressively bad drivers for years. NVIDIA has taken that over. At least with Intel Arc and its Alchemist GPUs, our expectations were low, and Intel has taken notable steps to address its issues. NVIDIA, on the other hand, continues to fumble in impressively bad ways. This is the type of thing that helps the company lose market share.
In the meantime, we will continue to monitor the driver situation and will provide an update when we find a more stable solution provided by NVIDIA.
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