There is a growing number of reports from RTX 50-series owners and some RTX 40-series owners of black screens presenting themselves along with crashes.
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At the moment, this issue is still very new and developing, but given the increasing frequency of reports from users, particularly RTX 50-series owners, it appears there are significant problems that need to be addressed. It’s always hard at the beginning of a new hardware launch to determine if there’s a real problem or if these “reports” are simply anecdotal, falsified to generate clicks, or a genuine issue that needs to be addressed by the hardware manufacturer. As for the RTX 50-series launch, it appears the latter is the case, as numerous reports of black screens and crashing have now resulted in NVIDIA stepping in with a statement to PCGamer.
NVIDIA was asked about the crashing and black screen reports from RTX 50-series owners and some RTX 40-series owners, and according to the publication, NVIDIA is aware of the problems and is currently “investigating the reported issues with the RTX 50-series.” Users experiencing these problems are reporting their occurrence in a variety of different scenarios, such as changing the resolution/refresh rate of a display, alt-tabbing a full-screen application, using multi-monitor setups, or even just when the system is under a heavy load.
It appears the problems can be traced back to NVIDIA’s latest 572.16 driver, which appears to also be causing some issues for RTX 40-series GPUs — meaning the issues aren’t isolated to NVIDIA’s latest GPU generation. So, what can be done? Unfortunately, not much if you are an RTX 50-series user experiencing these issues, as the 572.16 driver is the first driver for the RTX 50-series GPUs. If you are an RTX 40-series owner experiencing these problems, you can always use a software tool to uninstall your GPU drivers and reinstall an older version.
If you are planning on reinstalling the older version route, it’s recommended to use the tool Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU), which is a software tool that wipes any trace of the display driver from a system. This is necessary as some remnants of the display driver are still on the machine if the drivers are uninstalled traditionally or if another driver is installed on top of the old driver. It’s simply safer and rules out any potential hiccups when using DDU. If you are interested in downloading the software tool for yourself, you can find it here.
If reinstalling drivers doesn’t seem worth the hassle, you will, unfortunately, have to wait until NVIDIA releases a new statement regarding the issues, which will hopefully be accompanied by a new driver update or guidance on how to remedy these purported problems.