- Nvidia’s new Game Ready Driver 576.02 has a mountain of bug fixes
- It cures many problems with games crashing, and black screen lock-ups with RTX 5000 models
- While past-gen Nvidia GPUs aren’t mentioned in the release notes, it appears they got some love here too
Nvidia has released a new graphics driver that brings in support for its freshly introduced RTX 5060 Ti GPU, but I suspect what most gamers will be more interested in is the absolute mountain of bug fixes delivered here.
That includes the solutions for various games being crash-happy, as well as the most important fix of all for those who’ve bought one of Nvidia’s Blackwell graphics cards.
Yes, Game Ready Driver 576.02 (the release of which VideoCardz flagged) resolves the random black screen crashes that have been frustrating those with an RTX 5000 GPU, or Nvidia claims it does anyway.
On top of that, Nvidia lists a couple of other separate bug fixes for issues with RTX 5000 graphics cards getting black screen lock-ups “when playing graphically demanding games” as well as hitting black screens upon installing drivers and booting into Windows. (How about RTX 4000, or earlier RTX GPUs, black-screening, you might be thinking – well, I’ll come back to that).
On top of that vital work, a whole lot of general bug fixes are put in place here, such as “stability issues” with Windows 11 24H2 and stability quirks elsewhere, page fault error crashes when using DLSS 4 MFG (Multi-Frame Generation), PCs failing to wake after spending a long period asleep, DisplayPort-related problems, and much more besides.
Regarding the fixes for bugs that have hit specific games, we’ve got a lot of work on that front too. Check out the following list of solves:
- [Fortnite] random crashes during gameplay
- [The First Berserker: Khazan] DXGI_ERROR_DEVICE_REMOVED Crash
- [Star Wars Outlaws] Application will freeze after leaving the game idle for 5+ minutes
- Game stability issues when playing games with DLSS Frame Generation + GSYNC
- [Monster Hunter Wilds] Crash after accepting quest with DLSS-FG Enabled
- [InZoi] Game crashes with error “GPU crashed or D3D Device Removed”
- [Overwatch 2] Stutter when using VSYNC
- [Hellblade 2 Senua’s Saga] Increased aliasing when using TSR
- [Hellblade 2 Senua’s Saga] Crashing when using Smooth Motion
- [The Last of Us Part 1] Crash when using Smooth Motion
- Dithering/banding in some games on RTX 50-series GPUs
- [Control] Flickering corruption in multiple areas
- Stutter when using VSYNC
- VSYNC in NVCP + frame generation causes issues in DLSS 4 games
- [Uncharted: Legacy of Thieves Collection] Artifacts on screen when collecting treasures
If you want the exhaustive list of cures applied by Nvidia with this new graphics driver, see Chapter 3 of the full release notes [PDF]. Be warned, it’s a lengthy read.
Analysis: The importance of getting it right from the off – and what about RTX 4000 GPUs?
There’s a lot of good work here, then, and some important cures for RTX 5000 GPUs. Still, the sheer volume of the remediation work contained within this release doesn’t reflect well on Nvidia, because, in an ideal world, it shouldn’t have been necessary to apply these fixes in a ‘live’ fashion, as it were. These bugs, and notably the showstopping black screen crashes that have been present since the first Blackwell GPUs emerged, should’ve been ironed out before those graphics cards appeared on shelves.
This isn’t just about Blackwell, though. These black screen crashes that gamers have been suffering have also affected some of those with past-gen Nvidia GPUs (RTX 4000, or even RTX 3000 models going by some reports, but it’s more the former). There’s no mention of any fixes for black-screening with those graphics cards in Nvidia’s release notes here.
However, the positive news is that taking a sampling of reports on Reddit – caveat: hardly a scientific method, but a reasonable barometer of how things are going – it seems that a fair number of folks are saying their RTX 4000 black screen blues have been resolved. Now, not everyone is claiming that – some are still reporting issues (as you can see in the thread below) – but overall, the wind appears to be blowing in a more favorable direction with this latest driver.
Overall, then, it seems this is a solid step forward for Nvidia in terms of rectifying the many glitches that have manifested in its graphics drivers since Blackwell GPUs first emerged, which has to be a good thing.
But as noted, those bugs should never have been witnessed in such quantities to begin with, and it’s kind of bewildering as to how this happened – only serving to bolster the cases of those who theorized that Blackwell was a rushed launch.
