Driver issues with Nvidia GPUs? No, it’s not just you

While Nvidia’s focus has shifted to some of its best graphics cards from the RTX 50-series, its older GPUs seem to be running into some driver issues. Many users are turning to Reddit to report problems such as crashes, black screens, blue screens of death (BSODs), and issues launching certain games. These problems only seem to affect the latest drivers.

Scotty1992 on Reddit made a massive thread compiling various recent complaints related to Nvidia’s Game Ready driver, which mostly seems to include various versions of the 572.xx driver. The RTX 40-series appears to be the one most affected, with people reporting problems on cards such as the RTX 4090 or the RTX 4080.

Everything appeared to work well until Nvidia launched the RTX 50-series, with new drivers optimized for the RTX 5090, the RTX 5080, and the RTX 5070 Ti. Since then, users have been reporting problems on Nvidia’s older cards — although the comment section of Scotty1992’s post is flooded with feedback from people with RTX 50-series cards who also have these problems.

Most common complaints are centered around PC crashes, with Scotty1992 reporting that Cyberpunk 2077 will crash the entire PC. This has only started happening with the 572.xx driver, and rolling back to 566.xx fixes the issue — but that shouldn’t be the only thing gamers can do to get their GPUs to work.

“Happens on my 50 series (5080) as well. I have two monitors and anytime the system goes idle I have to either reboot the system or unplug and replug the video cable to the monitor,” said one unlucky user. Another one replied: “Happens on my 3080 recently as well. No issues like this in the 3 years before.”

While Nvidia’s RTX 50-series launch has been far from smooth, with limited availability, missing ROPs, and sky-high prices, the previous generations have been largely unaffected … up until recently. Personally, I own an RTX 4080 and have had no complaints, so not everyone is affected — but if you’ve got an RTX GPU, waiting to update your drivers seems like a smart move right now.