There is a version of driver week where you install the new build, gain some frames, and never think about it again. This is not that week. Game Ready Driver 616.56 landed on August 26 with a performance bump, and over the following days two separate regressions surfaced that between them touch anyone running an 8-bit panel and anyone pushing an RTX 50-series card past its stock power limit.
Start with the good news, because it is real. X user @opinali reports gains of up to 8.1% in path-traced workloads on 616.56, which is a jump for a driver that was not billed as a performance release. The build itself was framed around DLSS support for STAR WARS Zero Company, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, and Hell Let Loose: Vietnam.
Users began reporting desktop and browser flickering on monitors running at 8-bit color depth, with the pattern first documented by @renan_maniero on X and reproduced across multiple displays. NVIDIA has acknowledged the issue and says it is testing a fix. The workaround takes about ten seconds: open the NVIDIA App, go to System, then Displays, then set Output Color Depth to 10 bpc. Several affected users also report that enabling Windows Auto Color Management stops it. If your panel cannot do 10-bit, rolling back is the only option for now. This is not universal, and HDR reports are mixed, so there is no need to DDU your entire install over it.
The second regression is narrower but more annoying if it hits you. The open-source utility mVolt+, which let RTX 50-series owners raise the core power limit well past stock without a VBIOS flash or physical PCB work, now hard-crashes the driver when you try to adjust that limit. @unikoshardware documented the behavior on X, describing the interface blacking out as if the driver had crashed regardless of how much extra current was applied. Reports on the Overclock.net RTX 5090 thread indicate Hydra 2.3B Pro still applies power-limit changes fine, which suggests mVolt+ was not specifically blacklisted and its developer can patch around the conflict.
An intentional lockout would be a story about NVIDIA closing a door on enthusiasts. A compatibility break that one competing tool survives looks more like collateral damage, and we would rather say so than manufacture outrage. What is harder to shrug off is the cadence: this is the third driver cycle in recent months where the release notes were the least interesting part of the release. When we tested the GIGABYTE RTX 5090 GAMING OC, driver stability was not the variable we expected to be writing about a fortnight later.
If you have an 8-bit panel and you have already installed 616.56, flip to 10 bpc and get on with your day. If you overclock aggressively, sit this one out until mVolt+ catches up. And if you play anything path traced, as we noted with Directive 8020, the performance on offer here is probably worth the color-depth toggle.
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