Crashes and instability issues relating to RTX 50-series GPUs continue to rage on, and Nvidia still doesn’t have a fix ready for the public. Manuel provided an update on the Nvidia forums, noting that the RTX 50 series issues are still being investigated. The Nvidia staff member clarified that they don’t know if the fixes will arrive in driver form or in VBIOS form.
The update addressed users in the Nvidia 572.47 driver feedback thread complaining about the incessant black screen and crashing issues occurring on the RTX 5090, RTX 5080, and even some RTX 40-series GPUs. To everyone’s disappointment, the latest 572.47 drivers (which enable RTX 5070 Ti support) arrived with incredibly few bug fixes, only one, in fact, relating to driver stability issues when waking up a monitor from sleep mode.
Nvidia originally announced its investigation into these problems over a week ago when GeForce driver 572.16 had just been released. Issues regarding GPU stability and black screen crashes began when the 570 branch of drivers first launched. Issues with these drivers range from “minor” stuttering issues in games to full-blown BSODs that make the GPUs unusable.
Most of the major issues revolve around Nvidia’s RTX 50 series GPUs, but RTX 40- and allegedly even RTX 30-series GPUs are also experiencing issues. One user on the 572.47 feedback thread revealed BSOD errors running 572.47 on their RTX 4060—another with an RTX 4090 reports full system crash reboots whenever frame generation is running in-game.
While the issues appear to be driver-related, not all appear to be driver-specific. Manuel’s statement suggests there could be flaws in the RTX 50 series firmware, which the buggy 570 branch drivers exacerbate. This is compounded by other user reports stating that they got their GPUs working by downgrading PCIe functionality below Gen 5 speeds and or lowering monitor refresh rates down to 60Hz. By contrast, there have been no user reports (that we know of) where switching down PCIe speeds and monitoring refresh rates fixed issues on RTX 40-series or older GPUs while using drivers in the 570 branch. (This is a theory; take it with a grain of salt.)
We’ve also seen our fair share of issues with these newest drivers, including the aforementioned frame-generation crashing bug and black screens. We’ve also done a critical analysis of Nvidia’s latest driver branch, noting that it feels half-baked, particularly relating to DLSS 4 frame generation.
The RTX 50-series launch has been one of the rockiest launches for Nvidia to date. The new GPU lineup is plagued by non-stop availability issues, sky-high prices, the legitimate risk of melting 16-pin power connectors, not to mention the ongoing stability issues. The icing on the cake is the latest report of several RTX 5090 GPUs found defective, sporting fewer ROP units than advertised.