PC gamers know the risk and rewards of downloading the latest graphics drivers. On the one hand, you want them because they are designed to offer the best performance possible at the time. However, sometimes they can also cause unanticipated issues. Though Nvidia is generally held in high esteem on this front, its latest GeForce driver should be avoided. That is, if you care about it eating up CPU cycles until you reboot. Nvidia should be posting a hotfix today for the issue, however.
Nvidia has confirmed the problem with its latest 531.18 GeForce driver. It was released on February 28th and brought DLSS 3 to Atomic Heart, among other updates. However, it is causing CPU usage to spike after closing a game. The amount of CPU cycles it munches on varies, but according to PCWorld, it’s between 10-15%, which is not nothing. Nvidia’s feedback post on the driver highlights several outstanding issues. The CPU usage issue is just one of them, and it’s described as “Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container might be observed after exiting a game.” It appears the only way to end the CPU pillaging is to reboot. If you’re like this writer, you never even think about rebooting your PC, so this is an annoyance.
Check your Task Manager if you’re running the latest drivers. Luckily, this issue isn’t affecting your humble author.
Thankfully, Nvidia is aware of the issue. In a statement to the aforementioned world of PCs, it says it will be deploying a hotfix today (Tuesday). By the time you read this, it might already be available. If you don’t want to wait, you can either roll back your driver or download the previous 528.49 version.
Though this seems like a tiny bit of egg on Nvidia’s face, AMD’s latest drivers are not without issues either. The same site has been working with AMD on an issue that can brick your OS installation. It’s not precisely AMD’s fault, but it can occur if you try to install the latest Radeon drivers while Windows Update is active in the background. In a statement, AMD said, “We have reproduced an issue that can occur in an extremely small number of instances if a PC update occurs during the installation of AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition, and we are actively investigating. We recommend users ensure all system updates are applied or paused before installing the driver, and that the ‘Factory Reset’ option is unchecked during the AMD driver installation process.”
What’s surprising is PCWorld says the latest issue is due to Adrenaline driver 23.2.2, and the previous version was also causing some problems. As we wrote, it changed the boot order on some PCs after installation. This only affected folks with an AMD CPU and GPU, but it did cause some havoc.
For now, the lesson seems clear, regardless of which team you’re on: When a new graphics driver drops, be patient. Let others be guinea pigs before you install it, assuming you don’t need whatever the update provides.
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