Yesterday, NVIDIA updated its "Game Ready" driver for GeForce desktop and laptop graphics cards to version 576.28 25.4.1 — now available for download directly from NVIDIA.com.
The new driver supports the brand-new RTX 50 Series GPUs, which are currently bundled with free copies of DOOM: The Dark Ages, and previous models all the way back to prehistoric GTX cards.
Rather than boasting any breakthrough performance bumps with its DLSS 4 Transformer upscaling model, NVIDIA is mostly fixing issues from its previous driver, which is part of an ongoing fiasco that plagued RTX 50 Series GPUs with intermittent problems.
That's not to say game-specific fixes aren't present, because Black Myth: Wukong and Red Dead Redemption 2 are among the list of bug fixes. Nothing for the excellent Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered, though, that's up to Bethesda and Virtuos to improve performance for now.
Of particular note is a fix for lower-than-expected NVIDIA GPU clock speeds during idle states, and a solution to a collection of display bugs that were causing flickering at high refresh rates and outright blank screens when using HDR on a monitor connected via DisplayPort 2.1.
Is it safe to update your NVIDIA drivers?
While I'm an advocate of updating most firmware as soon as it's available, I'm a self-confessed pessimist when it comes to graphics drivers. Unless something is explicitly broken, I generally ignore them — that's a bad thing, by the way!
Well, it should be known as a bad thing, but the recent string of bugged NVIDIA GPU drivers almost justifies my scepticism. Still, this list of fixes looks like a positive turn for GeForce graphics.
If you have suffered any of the problems listed below, particularly the flickering monitor bug, then you absolutely should upgrade. Besides, you can always uninstall an NVIDIA graphics driver and fall back to a previous version if you need to. I've done it plenty of times in the past, and my RTX 4090 PC is still alive.
Load full changelog ↴
Patch notes
Fixed Gaming Bugs
- [RTX 50 series] [Black Myth]: The game will randomly crash when Wukong transforms [5231902]
- [RTX 50 series] [Red Dead Redemption 2]: The game crashes shortly after starting in DX12 mode. No issue in Vulkan mode [5137042]
- [RTX 50 series] [Horizon Forbidden West]: The game freezes after loading a save game [5227554]
- [RTX 50 series] Grey screen crashes with multiple monitors [5239138]
- [RTX 50 series] [Dead Island 2]: The game crash after updating to GRD 576.02 [5238676]
- [RTX 50 series] [Resident Evil 4 Remake]: Flickering background textures [5227655]
- [RTX 50 series] Some games may display shadow flicker/corruption after updating to GRD 576.02 [5231537]
- [RTX 50 series] Some games may crash while compiling shaders after updating to GRD 576.02 [5230492]
- [Forza Horizon 5]: Lights flicker at nighttime [5038335]
- [Forza Motorsport]: Track corruption occurs in benchmark or night races. [5201811]
Fixed General Bugs
- [RTX 50 series] Lower idle GPU clock speeds after updating to GRD 576.02 [5232414]
- [RTX 50 series] Momentary display flicker occurs when running in DisplayPort2.1 mode with a high refresh rate [5009200]
- Lumion 2024 crashes on GeForce RTX 50 series graphics card when entering render mode [5232345]
- GPU monitoring utilities may stop reporting the GPU temperature after PC wakes from sleep [5231307]
- [RTX 50 series] [LG 27GX790A/45GX950A/32GX870A/40WT95UF/27G850A]: Display blank screens when running in DisplayPort 2.1 mode with HDR [5080789]
- [RTX 50 series notebook] Resume from Modern Standy can result in black screen [5204385]
- [RTX 50 series] SteamVR may display random V-SYNC micro-stutters when using multiple displays [5152246]
- [RTX 50 series] Lower idle GPU clock speeds after updating to GRD 576.02 [5232414]
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