Another day, another driver, and sometimes the solution is worse than the problem it’s aimed at solving, as NVIDIA’s recent driver issues continue. NVIDIA’s Blackwell-based RTX 50 series GPUs may’ve debuted over four months ago with the introduction of its latest flagship, the GeForce RTX 5090, but it’s been nearly three months since reports of black screen issues, or worse, began appearing from users online. Since then, roughly half a dozen other drivers have been released, followed by hotfixes, to address other issues. However, it appears that owners of RTX series cards using said latest drivers may not be out of the woods just yet.
NVIDIA rolled out its newest 57x.xx driver, specifically 576.02, last week. It was intended to provide support for the recently launched RTX 5060 series of GPUs and another fix for those still experiencing black screen issues with their graphics cards. Unfortunately, though, once again, things did not go as planned, as it also introduced a potentially hardware-damaging issue. This time around, users found themselves trying to understand why GPU temperatures stopped updating. While this may seem like an annoyance, this issue impacted software such as the popular MSI Afterburner overclocking tool, which can manage cooling profiles, and without an accurate temperature reading, it cannot ramp up cooling fans when the GPU is under load.
Stuck Temperature Sensor Readings
Given the power-hungry nature of some graphics cards, particularly the aforementioned RTX 5090, which can easily pull upwards and over, 600 Watts, thus producing a significant amount of heat, not to mention already having a shared reputation of melted power connectors, it’s understandable why owners were concernced over what they were witnessing. There was some suggestion that the bug could reside with MSI Afterburner, whose author replied that it was not only untrue but that the issue seemed to follow either rebooting from sleep mode or after a fast startup. The issue with the stuck temp sensor reading also affected Windows Task Manager and Open Hardware Monitor, ruling out any aftermarket software of being the cause and pointing towards the API being broken from 576.02.
Well, once again, and please remember this has been ongoing since January-February, NVIDIA had to roll out yet another hotfix to fix another driver intended to fix other issues. This time around, the GeForce Hotfix Display Driver version 576.15 will hopefully solve more problems rather than introduce them, and can be downloaded from here.
Driver 576.15 Changelog:
- [RTX 50 series] Some games may display shadow flicker/corruption after updating to GRD 576.02 [5231537]
- Lumion 2024 crashes on GeForce RTX 50 series graphics card when entering render mode [5232345]
- GPU monitoring utilities may stop reporting the GPU temperature after PC wakes from sleep [5231307]
- [RTX 50 series] Some games may crash while compiling shaders after updating to GRD 576.02 [5230492]
- [GeForce RTX 50 series notebook] Resume from Modern Standy can result in black screen [5204385]
- [RTX 50 series] SteamVR may display random V-SYNC micro-stutters when using multiple displays [5152246]
- [RTX 50 series] Lower idle GPU clock speeds after updating to GRD 576.02 [5232414]