I was under the impression the Nvidia RTX 50-series black screen issue was dead and buried at this point, after VBIOS updates were released for some affected cards and an official driver from Nvidia itself claimed to fix it.
However, GeForce Hotfix Driver Version 572.75 claims to fix two specific problems (via Tom's Hardware). The first is related to the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 specifically, as the driver claims to fix an issue where either card may refuse to run at full speed when overclocked after a reboot. And the second? Yep, it's a black screen fix once again:
- [GeForce RTX 5080/5090] Graphics cards may not run at full speeds on system reboot when overclocked [5088034]
- [GeForce RTX 50-series] GeForce RTX 50 series GPUs crashes with black screen [5120886]
So, if you're an owner of an RTX 50-series GPU, first of all, congratulations on finding one—and second, I'd grab this particular driver if you're still plagued by black screen issues.
Or even if you're not. Our test cards have been behaving themselves since both the VBIOS updates and the previous most-recent drivers, but it never hurts to go for a belt and braces approach with this sort of thing.
Our glorious hardware overlord Dave James was previously forced to run an MSI RTX 5090 at 60 Hz to prevent black screens from occurring prior to the VBIOS update, and that strikes as some form of cruel punishment for the hardware-inclined.
A $2,000+ GPU with Multi Frame Generation support, forced to display at 60 Hz thanks to some behind-the-scenes malfunction. If you'd put down all that cash on one yourself, I think you'd have fair reason to be upset.
Still, multiple bites of the black screen cherry hopefully means we can all put this issue behind us and go back to discussing the ludicrous price mark ups and lack of availability of new GPUs as things currently stand. Business as usual for 2025 it seems, folks. Business as usual.
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