Despite several patches and hot fixes, Nvidia graphics card users are still reporting problems with drivers. This seems to largely involve black screens and game crashes, though some more serious problems have been reported. YouTube tech channel GamersNexus has been investigating the problem and can offer some advice to those affected.

The problems with Nvidia drivers have been most visible for users of the RTX 50 series, tying in to the other problems with the launch of those cards. However, users of RTX 40 and even RTX 30 series have also seen problems. This has prompted some developers to issue recommendations to roll back drivers to a more stable version.

The hardware experts at the GamersNexus YouTube channel have spent some time investigating these problems and trying to reproduce the errors. After extensive testing, the team at GamersNexus was able to isolate some causes and was even able to offer advice on a workaround.

“We have a few stop-gap solutions,” said GamersNexus host Steve Burke, “they're not great because they are just stop-gaps and may involve turning off stuff you might want to use.”

GamersNexus used a modified version of the usual testing set-up, utilising two monitors from different manufacturers with different refresh rates hooked into an Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super, both connected via DisplayPort.

Nvidia driver game issues replicated

Three main games were tested: Cyberpunk 2077, Star Wars: Outlaws, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider. All of these games have extensive user reports of crashes when used with recent Nvidia drivers. GamersNexus was able to replicate problems with these games, including hard crashes, black screens, and visual artefacts.

One surprising thing they discovered was the importance of where the display cables are plugged in. In some cases, merely swapping the monitor cables around in the graphics card ports reduced or eliminated the issue.

“We also suggest disabling G-Sync and Frame Generation,” Steve said, “Even if you do want them enabled, turn them off just to see what happens. It’s just a stop-gap until Nvidia issues a fix.” It was noted that this is not an ideal fix for the user or Nvidia, considering how much of Nvidia's marketing has leaned on frame generation to boost performance.

The final suggestion issued by Gamers Nexus was a driver rollback, which came along with instruction on how to do this properly without causing further problems for your setup.

Until Nvidia does manage to properly isolate and fix this issue, users will be forced to use stop-gap measures such as these.

About the Author

Rebecca Hills-Duty

Writing and journalism experience at VRFocus, UploadVR, The Escapist, HTC, PC Gamer, Tech Radar+ and Dexerto. Can sometimes be found playing with retro tech.