NVIDIA Is Investigating Black Screen And BSOD Issues On GeForce GPUs
Have you ever tried remotely diagnosing and ultimately resolving a computer issue for a frantic friend or family member who's having an issue, or a litany of PC-related issues? It's no easy task. Now put yourself in the shoes of NVIDIA's driver team, which is currently investigating a rash of stability issues across a variety of graphics card configurations in the wild.
To be clear, I'm not making excuses for NVIDIA, but I am sympathetic to the challenges of troubleshooting on such a large scale. And right now, there are multiple reports of lingering black screen issues and other bugs that don't appear to be resolved in the latest 'Game Ready' 572.47 driver release. It's somewhat reminiscent of a black screen bug that ended up requiring a firmware fix a couple of years ago.
Hopefully this is something that can be resolved with more driver releases. What's challenging is that NVIDIA is dealing with a wide variety of configs, as well as numerous issues. How the final fix arrives is not yet certain. A support rep in NVIDIA's forums stated as much while troubleshooting a user's lingering black screen complaint with the latest driver release.
"We are still actively investigating this issue. I don't know if a fix will come as a driver update or VBIOS update so I haven't added it to the list. Once I have further info, I'll make sure to share it with the community," the NVIDIA support rep stated.
On the positive side, the same rep says NVIDIA has been able to "reproduce this [issue] recently," but the driver team is not yet clear if it's a driver bug or an issue with a specific application. He did, however, confirm that it started with an earlier driver package (572.16).
Anecdotally, I recently encountered a short-lived black screen bug when applying the latest driver release for my GeForce RTX 3090 (an EVGA variant). The screen went black after the driver installed and stayed that way until I forced a reboot. I haven't gamed much recently, so it's not clear if that was a one-off issue or something that could resurface. Either way, it's been otherwise stable (knock on wood).
The release notes for the 572.47 also highlight a number of other open issues, including a blue screen of death (BSOD) bug that can manifest while gaming with HDR enabled. And specific to Blackwell GPUs (GeForce RTX 50 series), NVIDIA noted a couple of issues that are scheduled to be fixed in the next regular driver release. One is a bug where audio may stop working when using a DisplayPort 1.4 connector with DSC at very high refresh rates, and the other is a blank screen issue on soft reboots in Windows when using an ASUS PG32UCDM monitor.
Hopefully NVIDIA can get a handle on things in short order. Between reports of missing ROPs on a variety of Blackwell GPUs (which now include the GeForce RTX 5080 as well), melting connectors, and the general frustration of availability of the GeForce RTX 50 series, NVIDIA could use a win.
