NVIDIA's latest GPU drivers have been causing complex issues for GeForce RTX 40 series GPUs and even older ones, but NVIDIA has yet to address them.
Several Reports Emerge Detailing How GPU Driver 572.XX Has Been Messing up RTX 40-Based Systems
Since the launch of the RTX 50 series in January, NVIDIA has almost left the RTX 40 series GPUs in the dark when it comes to bug fixes. It's usual for companies to focus on newer products and while the RTX 50 series wasn't immune to issues like BSODs, the RTX 40 series was doing fairly well with previous GPU drivers until NVIDIA released RTX 50-compatible drivers that started to introduce complex issues with RTX 40 GPUs.
The Reddit user u/Soctty1992 explains his personal experiences with the newer driver 572.XX but has listed several such reports that overlap each other with some common bugs. These include issues like hard system crashes, black screens, and even display issues, which were rare in the pre-572.XX era.
PSA: Nvidia Widespread Black Screen or Hard OS Crash Issues on 4xxx (or older) Series Cards Need To Be Widely Known & Fixed.
byu/Scotty1992 inhardware
It's no coincidence that many of those users found success with 566.XX drivers that were available before NVIDIA released its 572.16 driver on 30th January to support the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080. A lot of new features were introduced with the launch of the RTX 50 series, including DLSS 4, Multi-Frame Generation, and DLSS Override. It's not that turning on some of these always results in the above-mentioned problems, but it's a mix of various factors that have to be investigated.
One user states that Cyberpunk 2077 on his RTX 4080 crashed right when it started, and it only got fixed with pre-572.XX drivers. Another user with RTX 4090 said that he encountered several issues like black screens, freezes, and monitors not being able to turn on at all. He, too, fixed it with the 566.XX drivers.
Apparently, NVIDIA ignored these bug fix requests, which have been actively reported by the users since the end of January. It only tried to fix the BSODs on RTX 50-series systems and that too was fixed after several weeks. Many RTX 40 owners have been forced to roll back to previous drivers, but that has also taken away from them the perks of the latest drivers, including the Transformer Model DLSS 4, updated Ray Reconstruction, and newly added games to the DLSS-supported games list.
