NVIDIA Pulls Emergency Driver Update After RTX 50 Fans Stop Spinning, GPUs Almost Melt

NVIDIA has yanked its GeForce Game Ready 595.59 WHQL driver just hours after its release. What was supposed to be a launch-day boost for Resident Evil Requiem and Marathon has turned into a technical trainwreck: RTX 50 series owners are flooding forums with complaints about dead fans, plummeting clock speeds, and random system reboots.

What makes this situation even more noteworthy is that, for the first time in a while, all three major GPU makers (NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel) dropped drivers for the exact same games. But while the competition got away with a minor bug fix, NVIDIA somehow managed to push an update that had to be recalled in an emergency.

Owners of GeForce RTX 50-series cards report that after updating, one or more of their GPU fans just freeze in place. Custom fan curves get ignored, and monitoring tools like HWiNFO and GPU-Z only show readings from a single sensor instead of multiple ones. Considering modern graphics cards pump out hundreds of watts of heat, fans seizing up can lead to critical overheating—and it was likely this exact risk that made NVIDIA pull the plug so fast.

The second wave of issues revolves around performance. Users noticed that after installing 595.59, the max clock speeds on their RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 took a noticeable nosedive. Enthusiasts quickly pinned down the culprit: the driver seems to be capping GPU voltage at 0.95V. As a result, cards simply can't hit their stock frequencies, causing in-game performance to tank. This hit Unreal Engine 5 titles especially hard, with users reporting severe frame rate drops in heavy scenes.

But that's still not all. The NVIDIA forum thread is littered with reports of BSODs throwing VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE errors, nvlddmkm driver crashes (Event ID 153), and sudden reboots. Samsung device owners are catching flak, too. Users are complaining about losing HDR signal, while owners of the Samsung ViewFinity S9 5K monitor report that waking the system from sleep drops the resolution to 640x480—something only a reboot can fix.

If you've already installed the cursed 595.59 driver, NVIDIA recommends rolling back to version 591.86 WHQL. You can do this through the Control Panel or the NVIDIA App—just head to the 'Drivers' section, click the three dots, and select the option to reinstall the previous version. As for when a fixed driver will drop, that's still up in the air, and judging by the official wording, NVIDIA's engineers are still figuring out exactly what went wrong.

Have you run into issues after updating your NVIDIA driver? What GPU are you running, and have you noticed any fan quirks or frequency drops? Drop a comment below.