«NVIDIA’s Worst Launch Ever»: New GeForce drivers cause games to crash and black screens

As part of their investigation, Gamers Nexus spent a lot of time looking into recent complaints about NVIDIA drivers. In fact, there are many issues with newer releases of NVIDIA graphics card drivers that are causing significantly more trouble for gamers than previous versions. This is especially true for previous generations of graphics cards, such as the RTX 30 or RTX 40 series, as well as the latest RTX 50 series.

What’s more, some game developers even recommend rolling back drivers to older versions, even before the RTX 50 is launched. This is a huge problem for NVIDIA when even game developers, who are actively promoted by NVIDIA itself, admit that the drivers have serious bugs that can only be solved by rolling back to previous versions.

There is a lot of pressure on the company, and collecting complaints from users does not help much to determine the exact cause or fix the bugs. Gamers Nexus analyzed hundreds of threads on forums and Reddit where gamers reported these problems. They noted that there are many combinations of system components that can cause these crashes. However, they were able to find common patterns and confirm that even with the latest drivers, the problems are reproducible. Interestingly, changing the driver version sometimes solves the problem, which confirms that NVIDIA software is to blame.

Typical problems with GeForce RTX drivers:

• Star Wars Outlaws: the game crashes when you press «Continue game»
• Marvel Rivals: activation of Frame Generation causes a crash
• Cyberpunk 2077: crash when loading the game
• Shadow of the Tomb Raider: benchmark crashes due to DXGI error (driver rollback solves the problem)
• Problems are especially common for users with multiple monitors, especially with G-Sync or high refresh rate monitors
• DLSS and Reflex can also affect
• Switching the monitor cable to a different video output — sometimes makes a difference
• System waking up from sleep may cause a black screen
• Older drivers (version 566) do not have such problems

Gamers Nexus has found that activating features such as DLSS 4, Frame Generation, or G-Sync can be a source of disruption. They recommend trying to disable these features to see if the problem goes away. But they emphasize that these are workarounds, not permanent fixes.

NVIDIA has also been criticized for the way they communicate and fix issues. Known black screen issues have allegedly been fixed five times in different driver versions, but the company has not said whether these glitches have been finally resolved or whether we should expect new updates. The reputation of NVIDIA’s stable drivers has been shaken, and even well-known reviewers such as Gamers Nexus admit that this is the worst NVIDIA driver launch in their years of experience.

We can only hope that the new drivers will be able to solve most of the problems. For those who don’t need the latest features like DLSS or don’t play the latest games, we recommend rolling back to stable older drivers — and playing without any problems.

This is not the first such problem. Last year, it was reported that NVIDIA drivers cause «death screen» with Windows 10 and older processors.

Source: videocardz