Nvidia's recent driver releases have caught a lot of criticism, not the least of which came from the developers of The First Berserker: Khazan and InZoi, who independently recommended gamers roll back to previous drivers to avoid issues. The scope of the problem is starting to come into focus now, though. The boogieman of tech controversies, Gamers Nexus, has been able to reproduce several of the issues reported by users, calling Nvidia's recent driver releases "absolutely abhorrent" and "completely embarrassing."

Nvidia's recent drivers have a lot of problems

Display settings seem to be the main culprit, though

If you recall, Nvidia tackled a widespread issue with its drivers over the past month, where both RTX 50-series and RTX 40-series GPUs would crash to a black screen, completely locking up the system in some cases. Those issues are still happening, but the problems with Nvidia's drivers go deeper, according to Gamers Nexus.

The YouTube channel set up a test bench that wouldn't be ideal for GPU testing, hooking up two monitors with different refresh rates, resolutions, and G-Sync certifications to an RTX 4070 Super. Although that's not ideal for performance testing, it's a realistic setup for most PC gamers with two monitors. After getting a game to crash, the team stepped through each variable and adjusted to see what the root cause of the crash was. And, bad news for Nvidia, most of the crashes relate to Nvidia's own features.

Gamers Nexus was able to reproduce crashes in Star Wars: Outlaws, Marvel Rivals, Cyberpunk 2077, and Shadow of the Tomb Raider, but the reason for each crash varied. For instance, in Marvel Rivals, turning on Nvidia's DLSS Frame Generation caused a crash, while in Star Wars Outlaws, resuming a game caused a crash. More interesting is that the root cause of the crash changed from game-to-game.

One of the more interesting notes out of the investigation comes down to the ports on the GPU. Gamers Nexus says that switching the order of the DisplayPort connections actually solved the crashing in Cyberpunk 2077. This is something I've encountered, as well, particularly when swapping Nvidia GPUs on my test bench. I'll occasionally need to swap over to an HDMI cable to get the GPU to show any output at all on the first boot, but afterward, DisplayPort works as it normally does.

If you're encountering problems, Gamers Nexus has a few recommendations. First, try different ports on your GPU, and if you're using DisplayPort, try swapping to HDMI to see that resolves the crashes. Beyond that, the YouTube channel recommends turning off G-Sync, DLSS Frame Generation, and Reflex, as they all contributed to crashes at some point. For now, though, it's probably best to roll back to a previous Nvidia driver using Display Driver Uninstaller.