NVIDIA Stuck Again: New Driver Update Makes Things Worse

NVIDIA has released the Game Ready 576.02 driver, aimed at resolving over 40 known issues affecting RTX 30, 40, and 50 series graphics cards. However, instead of the expected improvements, many users are reporting new problems — including black screens, performance dips, and issues with multi-monitor setups.

Open forum discussions reveal that the update did help some high-end GPU owners. One RTX 4090 user reported that crashes in Cyberpunk 2077 were resolved after installing the new driver. Still, others are seeing the opposite effect: forum posts describe cases where systems become completely unresponsive after the update, requiring a hard reboot. One RTX 3080 Ti owner reported that two out of three monitors stopped working altogether. Reverting to the previous 566.36 driver temporarily fixed the issue.

Of particular concern is a drop in frame rates in titles like Monster Hunter Wilds and Path of Exile 2. Some users have restored performance by clearing shader caches, but this workaround doesn’t help everyone. Color calibration bugs when changing display resolution remain unresolved as well. Even the new RTX 50 series cards aren’t spared. Since January 2025, owners have faced unstable DLSS 4 performance, random crashes, and GPU initialization issues. While NVIDIA has previously acknowledged the problems and said it’s investigating, the only stable solution for now is still to roll back to version 566.36 from December 2024 — though it lacks support for Multi-Frame Generation (MFG), a key feature.

Experts and developers currently recommend disabling DLSS and G-Sync to avoid potential conflicts. Some studios even explicitly suggest using older driver versions for compatibility. The situation highlights ongoing uncertainty around software optimization for newer GPU generations, frustrating many in the community. With no official comment from NVIDIA yet, users are left to test different drivers on their own, balancing between stability and access to new features.