RTX 40 GPU owners suffering from BSODs and crashes complain about Nvidia's RTX 50 focus

Nvidia's R570 branch of GPU drivers came with several instability issues that troubled RTX 50 series owners, and reports suggest the impacts were felt by some using older GPU architectures, as well. A few hotfixes down the road, Nvidia has pushed fixes for these black screen issues specifically for the RTX 50 series. However, it appears that older GPUs continue to suffer. To voice growing concern, a user at r/hardware has compiled a comprehensive list featuring numerous testimonies from affected RTX 40 and RTX 30 series users. Multiple reports indicate recurring symptoms, with impacted customers still awaiting a response from Nvidia.

Users report that these instability issues manifest in the form of BSODs, hard crashes which typically require a reboot, and system freezes. A significant chunk of these reports stem from application and feature-specific crashes, particularly when enabling Nvidia's DLSS Frame Generation feature. It's important to understand that these stability concerns are not new, as we can find traces of them dating back to late January with the introduction of Nvidia's 572.16 driver, which enabled RTX 50 support.

One of the possible suspects is using DLSS Frame Generation with G-Sync, based on the user reports. Several faced performance degradation, but the majority experienced crashes. Using older DLSS implementations fixed these issues for some. A large chunk of these users are facing compatibility problems with titles such as Cyberpunk 2077, Alan Wake 2, God of War Ragnarok, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, just to name a few. In all these games, the reported symptoms range from stuttering, freezing, and crashes, particularly with frame generation when using 572.xx series drivers from Nvidia.

The community has found several workarounds, with a few common fixes including rolling back drivers, disabling Frame Generation and/or G-Sync, downgrading the DLSS version, and lowering refresh rates, among other related Band-Aid solutions. Even if Nvidia's software division is presumably cooped up with finetuning RTX 50 drivers, complete silence on these concerns is reflecting badly. These issues have been troubling RTX 40 series owners for almost three months, with no definite or official resolution.

Nvidia has addressed several compatibility issues in multiple driver releases across its R570 software, however, most of them are only applicable to the RTX 50 series. Downgrading your drivers to version 566.xx has been a successful workaround, but it's a double-edged sword, as you'll be locked out of many new features. A source of significant frustration and disconnect is that Nvidia is not officially acknowledging these concerns, as the "Known Issues" section under almost every new driver release fails to mention anything related to the RTX 40 series.