Nvidia driver issues called out by Gamers Nexus “the worst launch I’ve ever seen for Nvidia”
Nvidia’s being compared to Vega-era AMD as driver issues become common knowledge
Nvidia and driver issues; was that on your 2025 bingo card? 2025 has not been kind to Nvidia’s reputation, at least in the PC gaming market. From launching GPUs with insufficient supply to ongoing driver issues, Nvidia’s reputation among gamers is taking a battering.
Last week, several game developers recommended that RTX 40/30 series GPU owners downgrade to graphics drivers from 2024. Now, Gamers Nexus has released a video slamming Nvidia for these issues. Today’s Nvidia has been compared to Vega-era AMD, a comparison that is hugely humiliating for Nvidia.
How the turns have tabled, Nvidia is now playing the role of AMD circa VEGA, which is not good. The drivers have been unstable and we’ve been able to replicate that.
Gamers Nexus were able to replicate a bunch of issues that have impacted RTX GPU users. None of these problems affected Nvidia’s old 566-series drivers. This includes “resume” crashing in Star Wars Outlaws, Marvel Rivals crashes when Frame Generation is used, Cyberpunk 2077 crashes, and benchmark crashes in Shadow of the Tomb Raider.
Issues impacting multi-monitor users were also discussed, highlighting how high refresh rate and G-Sync monitor users were most affected. Issues when using DLSS and Nvidia Reflex were also discussed. Furthermore, strange fixes like swapping GPU display outputs were also found to have an impact.
Gamers Nexus also noted that using Nvidia features like DLSS, Frame Generation, and G-Sync could also cause issues. As such, gamers experiencing issues have been told to disable these features. Sadly, these features are Nvidia’s most prominent selling points, making their instability a HUGE problem.
These suggestions we have, while they will help in a lot of cases, they’re just workarounds. They don’t fix the problem, so we just have to wait for Nvidia to provide a legitimate solution.
This has been an absolutely abhorrent and completely embarrassing launch for Nvidia. I mean, this is, we talked about it already a couple of times, genuinely, in the time since I’ve been doing this, since 2008, focusing on hardware since about 2010. In that time, this is the worst launch I’ve ever seen for Nvidia.
Nvidia needs to fix its driver issues
Nvidia needs to address these issues. The longer it takes for these issues to get fixed, the more and more people will talk about them. These discussions will slowly chip away at Nvidia’s reputation within the PC gaming space, and that’s bad for Nvidia in the long term.
While RTX 30 and RTX 40 series users can revert to older drivers to avoid these issues, RTX 50 series users don’t have this option. Furthermore, using older drivers won’t benefit from Nvidia’s optimisations for newly released games, potentially giving them a sub-par gaming experience.
Hopefully, Nvidia can address these issues soon. After all, gamers should be enjoying their games, not wrestling with driver issues.
You can join the discussion on Nvidia’s driver issues on the OC3D Forums.
