Reports of RTX 50 series black screen issues have led to a new investigation by NVIDIA as more owners state their cards are no longer usable. It seems yet another GPU launch drama has arisen and this time around users are reporting an odd phenomenon with black screen issues for their GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 graphics cards. Reports began appearing earlier in the week with NVIDIA’s export regulation-compliant GPU, the GeForce RTX 5090D. While there was some belief that the issue might only be limited to that model, it now looks as if that is not the case, and the entire RTX 50 desktop series could be at risk for the peculiar problem.
Per PCGamer:
“Indeed, we’ve queried Nvidia and have been told: “We are investigating the reported issues with the RTX 50 series.”
More gremlins than you can shake a GPU at
A growling list of users is posting on Reddit (1,2) about their RTX 50 series cards behaving oddly. From rotating colors onscreen to full-on black, they essentially give up the farm at some point either while gaming or benchmarking, or simply after a driver update. The cause is akin to a snipe hunt at the moment with blame ranging from a bad driver being the latest version 572.16, PCIe settings, screen refresh settings, user errors, and perhaps a need to use DDU (display driver uninstaller) prior to updating to the latest aforementioned driver. However, there’s enough discrepancy among the reports to shed doubt on what the exact cause may be but many do seem to point to the driver which has also been reported on NVIDIA’s forums to have caused issues for users with RTX 30 and RTX 40 series GPUs. VideoCardz has also been petitioned to post about the issue in hopes it will motivate NVIDIA to expedite a fix more quickly.
Its not an issue with the cards
— Palatine (@xbtPalatine) February 7, 2025
Its the newest driver 572.16
Effecting cards of almost all generations and needs to be rolled back
Just another day for a GPU launch
It’s not uncommon for issues to arise with new CPU or GPU launches, regardless of manufacturer, but NVIDIA has had its share when it comes to its RTX graphics cards. The flagship GeForce RTX 2080 Ti notably had the “space invaders” effect in 2019 that garnered a fair amount of chuckling from within the community, at least as long as you were not the one stuck with it. This was followed by the RTX 30 series crash-to-desktop (CTD) issues in 2020. Taking things up a level the infamous melting 12VHPWR connector for the RTX 4090 still occasionally gets reported on. So it would seem these reports of RTX 50 series black screens are just the latest unfortunate launch issue for NVIDIA.