- Nvidia’s 595.71 driver broke overclocking for graphics card users
- The driver limited GPU voltages, leading to underperformance
- Nvidia has just released a hotfix that fixes the problem
Usually, underclocking your graphics card requires a lot of careful manipulation, benchmarking and tweaking to get everything exactly right. It’s not something that’s forced on you or comes out of the blue, but it seems to be exactly what happened to many Nvidia customers who upgraded some of the top GPUs to the company’s 595.71 driver. Fortunately, although it did impact real-world gaming performance, a fix is now available.
The issue was reported by VideoCardz, with the outlet noting that early feedback from the 595.71 driver had included reports of “change in core voltage and boost behavior, with many claiming a ceiling of around 0.95 to 0.975 V and clocks stalling around 2,955 to 2,985 MHz, or around 3,000 MHz, even after manual overtime.”
In other words, users’ overclocking abilities appeared to be limited by the software update. Apparently this was not proven until customers installed the 595.71 driver. While the issue didn’t seem to be limited to a single graphics card, it only seemed to affect those from the RTX 50 series.
Users were not satisfied. On the official Nvidia support forums, for example, user bloodknight2012 said that their custom overclock was “completely destroyed” by the driver. The forums were filled with similar comments from disgruntled customers, suggesting the problem may have been widespread.
At the time, it was not clear whether this was a bug or a deliberate decision by Nvidia. If it was the latter, there was speculation that it might have been done to prevent the kind of overheating problems that have plagued high-end Nvidia graphics cards in recent years.
Still, the absence of any mention of the enforced undervoltage in the release notes for the 595.71 driver suggested that it wasn’t something Nvidia was aware of. And with the release of a patch in the latest 595.76 hotfix, it appears that the problem was a bug all along.
A fix is available
Nvidia users have had to deal with more than their fair share of driver issues in recent months, with huge piles of fixes being issued and repeated updates failing to fix underlying issues. It got so bad that we were afraid to install the drivers on our own machines in case something went wrong.
According to a post on Nvidia’s support site, the 595.76 hotfix fixes a number of issues. Most critically for people affected by the undervoltage bug, Nvidia says the hotfix fixes the following issue: “When the graphics card is overclocked, the GPU voltage can be limited, preventing it from boosting to expected levels.” With the 595.76 hotfix, this should no longer be a cause for concern.
Additionally, this update fixes glowing white dots that appear in Resident Evil Requiem when Subsurface Scattering is enabled, trajectory tracking performance improves i Resident Evil Requiemand resolves client crashes in Star citizenamong other corrections.
So, if you’ve found that your Nvidia graphics card has been behaving badly ever since you installed the 595.71 driver, you’ll want to install this update to fix things.
You may also want to check out our guide to rolling back your GPU driver if you experience other errors in the future. Sometimes all you can do is roll back and wait for a hotfix.
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