Nvidia Founders Edition RTX 5090
Credit: PCMag
Nvidia has been releasing hotfixes, new BIOS firmware, and driver updates to fix the ongoing black screen issues plaguing Nvidia card owners. Although some of these have started to fix the problems faced by new RTX-50 cards, gamers with older RTX 40 and 30-series cards are claiming that the problems are worse than ever. They're complaining that Nvidia is focusing too much on the latest releases while ignoring the majority of affected Nvidia gamers.
Alongside stock issues, melting cables, and missing hardware, the RTX 50 series has been plagued by problems with black screen crashes and driver-release issues since the release of the RTX 5090 in January. Nvidia gamers with older 40 and 30-series graphics cards started reporting similar issues when Nvidia released its 572.16 driver, which enabled support for the new Blackwell graphics cards. Several months on, the problems aren't anywhere close to being sorted.
RTX 50 owners claim that many of the black screen and crash issues have since been fixed, but for the rest of the Nvidia user base, that's not necessarily the case. Reddit user Scott199 (via TechSpot) compiled a list of complaints from RTX 30 and 40-series owners who are still experiencing problems with their graphics cards, seemingly related to the driver issue introduced by Nvidia's Blackwell cards.
They are extensive, and many more comments flooded the thread from similarly frustrated gamers. This is a problem that is far from over.
Nvidia RTX 4080 Super.
Even powerful last-generation cards like the RTX 4080 Super appear affected.
Credit: Nvidia
If you're experiencing these issues, the community suggests rolling back your drivers to a previous version that did work. One suggested driver is the 566.36 release, though that's far from a universal fix and may not work for you. It's also worth noting that this will make it impossible to play some of the games optimized as part of more recent driver releases, such as Half-Life: 2 RTX.
Another user claimed that their issue appeared to be related to frame generation and DLSS, so it might be that using an older version of DLSS (or skipping upscaling altogether for now) would be a viable fix in the near term. But even then, that leaves users who spent hundreds or even thousands of dollars on a graphics card unable to use it to its full potential.
For its part, Nvidia claims to still be working on the issue as a whole, though the criticism is mounting that it's prioritizing its new cards. While that may be the case on the software front, it's hard not to see this as another example of Nvidia not prioritizing its gaming audience. Elsewhere, it's been making big announcements in AI hardware at GTC, highlighting where it really sees the company making its hay moving forward.