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Nvidia's rollout of the RTX 50 series was disastrous when it came to drivers; black screening issues, game crashes, and even weird clock rate issues were pervasive at launch, taking several months to be ironed out. While the RTX 50 series undoubtedly stole the spotlight when it came to those particular problems, it wasn't just the latest and greatest from Nvidia that suffered the same fate. Countless RTX 40 series users faced similar issues, and there were even some reports of RTX 30 series cards affected, too. My RTX 4080 was one of the affected cards, and I'm so ridiculously fed up with Nvidia.
Nvidia's driver issues have been ongoing for several months, and it's not the first time that they've plagued Nvidia's cards, either. I had seen reports of driver issues affecting RTX 50 series cards, unaware that they had affected the RTX 40 series as well, and as someone who plays a lot of esports titles and not a huge amount else, I can sometimes go months at a time without updating my GPU drivers. However, I updated my drivers when the time came to be able to play DOOM: The Dark Ages, quickly regretting my decision. As it turned out, I needed to downgrade all the way back to Nvidia's 566.36 driver, released in early December, and I wasn't alone.
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Nvidia dropping 32-bit CUDA support makes me worry about the future
We've already seen it happen in the past, but there were usually workarounds.
Nvidia's black screening issues affected the RTX 40 series, too
It's not just new cards experiencing problems
It all started when I was playing Valorant with four of my friends; my PC black screened, my GPU fans spun to 100%, but I could still hear the Discord call I was in. Even weirder, they could still hear me for a few seconds, too. I rebooted, launched the game, rejoined, and it would happen again a few rounds later. I looked in my event viewer, and the above log entry is one of many that I saw. I was able to finish out the game and decided to have a closer look at the event log to see what exactly had happened.
Here's the full text of the error:
Fault bucket , type 0
Event Name: LiveKernelEvent
Response: Not available
Cab Id: 0
Problem signature:
P1: 141
P2: ffffa3083bd26010
P3: fffff80265ab9710
P4: 0
P5: ffffa308206e7080
P6: 10_0_26100
P7: 0_0
P8: 256_1
P9:
P10:
LiveKernelEvent 141, also known as Bug Check 0x141, refers to a "VIDEO_ENGINE_TIMEOUT_DETECTED" error. It means that the display engine failed to respond in time to the Windows kernel, which is typically caused by GPU drivers. Searching for this particular error code online shows many people who reinstalled their GPU drivers or replaced their GPU entirely in order to have a working PC again. So, I'd narrowed it down to a GPU issue at this point, but there was no clear path to figuring out what exactly had happened.
So, putting it down to a transient event, I played another game, and the crash happened again. And again. And again. It was only happening in Valorant, but it seemed fairly consistent. I was already on driver 573.24, so I rolled back to driver 573.06. It then didn't happen for a full game, only to happen in the next, and I rolled back to driver 572.83. I couldn't play DOOM anymore, but I just wanted the problem to be over with... and, yet, it happened again. At this stage, I had already received a three-day ban from Valorant for leaving games, and I was incredibly frustrated. I was eyeing up my Intel Arc A770 and considering switching over, thinking my RTX 4080, which I've had for only two years, had given up the ghost.
I sat down to do some proper research and figure out what was going on, with the only indicator being the VIDEO_ENGINE_TIMEOUT_DETECTED error that I previously mentioned. I hadn't ever experienced anything like this, but it seemed too consistent to be a run-of-the-mill hardware issue. It wasn't happening in regular system usage, and even deploying LM Studio and using it was completely fine. However, I quickly found comments on the Nvidia forums, the Nvidia subreddit, and even game-specific subreddits like Helldivers 2 describing the exact same problem that I had. PC works fine, they play a game, experience a sudden black screen crash, reboot to find a weird error in the event viewer, and the problem goes away until they're playing a game again. What was strange was that the same behavior, right down to the same bug check error, seemed to be appearing across both the RTX 40 and the RTX 50 series.
The Helldivers 2 subreddit had a solution for me, though. It wasn't just a downgrade to a previous driver version; it was a downgrade to version 566.36, a version from all the way back in December. That version had its own issues, but it was stable, and that's what I cared most about. Sure enough, my issues immediately disappeared, and I could play again. I later discovered the same fix had been shared on the Nvidia forums, again from another user who was experiencing the exact same problems that I had been. Plus, back in April, YouTube channel Gamers Nexus was able to reproduce crashes on recent Nvidia drivers in a whole heap of games on both the RTX 40 and RTX 50 series.
Now, for those who may be clued in on Windows updates, you may be thinking about the bug that KB5058499 fixed, which was a problem introduced with Windows 11 24H2's graphics kernel driver. Unfortunately, that appears to be a different issue, as if we look at the changelog for KB5058499, Microsoft stated the following:
[Graphics kernel] Fixed: An issue where some game titles become unresponsive after upgrading to 24H2
However, note that it says the game titles become unresponsive, not that an entire computer would black screen and fail to respond. Other users also reported that this was a separate issue, and that they still experienced crashes after installing this particular Windows update. On top of that, if it were solely a Microsoft issue, downgrading drivers wouldn't fix the problem, as the problem would still exist within Windows 11's graphics kernel.
Thankfully, Nvidia's recently released driver version 576.80 addresses the issue and seems to fix it once and for all. I haven't experienced any crashing since installing it, and many users on Reddit now report that their problems have been fixed, too. But how did this bug ever make its way to production in the first place? Why are such drastic problems being introduced to a GPU two and a half years after its release?
Nvidia still has problems
Some older games still don't work
While many of the issues affecting the RTX 40 series, including the issues on my RTX 4080, were fixed with the most recent update, it's not the end of the company's driver woes. 32-bit Windows DXVK is still broken on Blackwell, though Nvidia has said it's been fixed internally and a "future driver" will include the fix... but that was said before 576.80, and 576.80 didn't include it. To make matters worse, for RTX 5060 buyers who were plagued with those black screening issues, too, they can only now update to stop it from happening. To make matters worse, when it came to the 5060, there wasn't a downgrade path like on other cards, and the minimum supported version was 576.52.
For those not in the know, the 32-bit Windows DXVK issue is a lot bigger than it seems on the surface. Titles like Left 4 Dead 2, GTA IV, Borderlands 2 and Fallout: New Vegas (with the DXVK mod) have all reportedly been unplayable as a result, and given Nvidia has already stated that it's fixed internally, it's an incredibly frustrating experience for consumers who have been waiting on a fix for these games for the past few months after they worked at launch. For now, affected users have been downgrading to 572.83 so that they can play those titles without issue.
Plus, there are a ton of other issues too, like Cyberpunk 2077 crashing when using photo mode with path tracing enabled, and Battlefield 2042 showing artifacting around light sources during gameplay. Final Fantasy XVI's mod that adds support for ultrawide monitors, uncapped FPS, and more will also cause crashes on the RTX 50 series. On top of that, the company had to release a UEFI firmware update tool for RTX 5060 cards, as some motherboards would experience a blank screen on boot.
It's a terrible look, and makes consumers feel like beta testers rather than people who have spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a graphics card from a company supposed to be the best in the business. This entire ordeal has made me significantly more apprehensive of Nvidia's driver updates, something I never really worried about over the last couple of years. It feels like every update over the past few months that's aimed at fixing one issue introduces another with it. I know I'm not alone, and the entire experience has been nothing short of frustrating.
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