Nvidia’s drivers are still broken, but this new hotfix solves a ton of issues

Nvidia’s drivers have been in hot water lately. Following the release of its latest Blackwell cards, Nvidia’s drivers have seen an onslaught of issues from black screens in games to crashes. Despite a massive driver update earlier this month that promised to solve the issues facing Nvidia’s latest GPUs, problems remain, and a new hotfix driver promises to fix at least some of the bugs that are still floating around.

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Nvidia’s newest hotfix driver includes a ton of bug fixes

We might not be completely out of the woods yet, though

The latest hotfix driver is version 576.26, which is aimed at addressing the issues present in the 576.02 certified driver that released earlier this month. Per Nvidia’s patch notes, here are the issues the hotfix driver solves:

• [RTX 50 series] [Black Myth]: The game will randomly crash when Wukong transforms
• [RTX 50 series] [LG 27GX790A/45GX950A/32GX870A/40WT95UF/27G850A]: Display blank screens when running in DisplayPort 2.1 mode with HDR
• [Forza Horizon 5]: Lights flicker at nighttime
• [Forza Motorsport]: Track corruption occurs in benchmark or night races.
• [RTX 50 series] [Red Dead Redemption 2]: The game crashes shortly after starting in DX12 mode. No issue in Vulkan mode
• [RTX 50 series] [Horizon Forbidden West]: The game freezes after loading a save game
• [RTX 50 series] Grey screen crashes with multiple monitors
• [RTX 50 series] [Dead Island 2]: The game crash after updating to GRD 576.02
• [RTX 50 series] [Resident Evil 4 Remake]: Flickering background textures
• [RTX 50 series] Momentary display flicker occurs when running in DisplayPort2.1 mode with a high refresh rate

In addition to new fixes, 576.26 includes all the fixes that were included with 576.15; another hotfix for 576.02 which started rolling out last week. These aren’t certified drivers, so you won’t see them on the main Nvidia driver download page or within the Nvidia app. Hotfixes, according to Nvidia, are “beta, optional, and provided as-is,” so you may encounter new bugs that weren’t present in the previous certified driver.

Although AMD and Intel often provide beta drivers between certified releases, Nvidia rarely issues new hotfixes. Even more rare is an Nvidia hotfix that solves multiple issues. It’s not surprising to see so many releases from Nvidia over the past several weeks, though. Since the launch of RTX 50-series GPUs, Nvidia has faced major criticism about the stability of its drivers. Most of the problems concern Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPUs, though there have been a handful of bugs related to older generations, as well.

Nvidia will eventually round up all the various fixes released through hotfix drivers into a new certified driver, so if you aren’t experiencing issues, it’s best to hold off on this update. Despite plenty of bugs, users report that 576.02 comes complete with a solid performance boost.