Another Nvidia GPU driver has issues, causing up to 16% drops in performance

Nvidia drivers are causing issues again. Less than a week since users started reporting that driver version 595.59 was causing graphics card fans to stop working, a new driver release intended to fix those issues - version 595.71 - is now causing cards to run at lower voltages, power levels, and clock speeds, resulting in as much as 16% lower performance.

Nvidia's track record for driver stability has been impressive, particularly in more recent years, leading to many users trusting new releases to be stable and performant, particularly those that are billed as Game Ready and released in time to support new games. However, this release of two quite drastically problematic drivers in quick succession could start to erode that trust.

This latest driver was released yesterday, March 2, and it has managed to fix the main problems that had affected driver 595.59. However, according to several sources, driver 595.71 is now limiting core clock speed and voltage, causing some overclocked cards to see dramatic drops in peak performance.

The issue was first spotted by tech YouTuber Bang4BuckPC Gamer, who shows in the video below how, when using a previous Nvidia driver, their RTX 5090 could run at well over 3,100MHz with a voltage of as high as around 1.050V. However, after installing the new driver, these numbers drop to under 3,000MHz and under 1V.

Those changes might not sound like a lot, but the net result is that in back-to-back runs of the Unigine Heaven benchmark, there's clearly a big drop in performance. In the screenshot below, we can see the older driver (591.74) is hitting 171fps at this point in the benchmark, while the newer release is hitting just 144fps, plus there's a 143MHz difference in clock speed and 0.060V difference in clock voltage.

Others have corroborated the data, with WCCFTech also testing an RTX 5090, with similar outcomes, and one commenter on the original video reports that cards such as the RTX 5070 Ti are also affected.

The majority of the effect appears to be restricted to when using manual overclocking tools, such as MSI Afterburner, with the core clock and voltage increases it normally opens up now no longer having the same level of effect. We're yet to verify the extent to which it affects factory overclocked or default clock speed cards.

For now, the solution if you are affected appears to be to roll back to a driver 591 variant, with Bang4BuckPC Gamer showing expected performance with 591.74 and WCCFTech showing expected performance using 591.86. You can find Nvidia's download pages for these versions by just googling "Nvidia driver" and the driver version number.