Zotac's New BIOS Update Aims To Fix Black Screen Glitch On RTX 5060 Ti

Issues with unexpected black screens on Nvidia GPUs have been casting quite the shadow on the company's GeForce RTX 50 series cards lately. There's some hope on the horizon though, at least for Zotac GeForce RTX 5060 Ti card owners that are experiencing black screen issues.

The annoying black screens come in several varieties, as attested by yours truly -- on POST, on Windows boot, when the PC is coming back from sleep, and occasionally even when the monitor is simply turning on after you move the mouse or press a key. Zotac's fix is specific to its 5060 Ti cards and pertains black screens after rebooting.

The company claims the root cause is "use of a legacy motherboard", although without more specifics, there's no telling what exactly Zotac considers "legacy." If we had to guess, we'd say it means AM4 motherboards or older. Since you'll need to be running the tool inside Windows, Zotac suggests updating the motherboard BIOS, ensuring it's booting in UEFI mode, boot using integrated graphics or another card, or booting into Windows safe mode.

That last mention seems to imply that whatever gremlin is gumming up the works is probably during the Windows boot process, something that correlates with my own findings over many hours of diagnosing, but offers no details beyond that. In fact, "black screen" can also describe this entire situation, as Nvidia has been mum on the root cause of this issue, or of any specific workarounds -- just releasing new driver versions and multiple hotfixes.

In fact, last month Nvidia itself released BIOS updates for RTX 5060 cards specifically, muddying the waters even further. There's also no word on the relationship, if any, between Zotac's fix and Nvidia's. Nvidia has enjoyed an excellent reputation over decades for the stability of its drivers and general functionality of its cards, but it as the saying goes, it takes years to build trust and only a day to break it.

Thanks to OverClock3d.net for the heads-up.