What just happened? It appears that Nvidia has started addressing at least one of the many problems affecting the RTX 5000-series. A fix for the black screen issues that have impacted certain Blackwell GPUs, as well as previous card generations, is already available for some users, with a driver update arriving later this week.
Last week brought news that Nvidia was investigating the black screen and system instability problems that were affecting RTX 5000-series, 40-series, and 30-series cards. Nvidia had acknowledged the problems the previous week following the 572.16 driver release.
While three generations of cards have been affected, the RTX 5000 series seemed to be experiencing most issues, which range from minor stuttering and crashes to blue screens of death.
There were reports of some user getting around the problems by capping their display's refresh rate at 60Hz, which isn't what you want when gaming on high-end cards.
Now, Nvidia has identified the problem, though it hasn't yet revealed what it is. A Reddit user (via VideoCardz) says their MSI Gaming Trio RTX 5080 just received a VBIOS update that addressed the black screen issues completely. Apparently, it even squeezed some extra performance out of the card.
An Nvidia representative replied to the Reddit post, confirming that this was an official fix. They added that any user whose card had not received a VBIOS update could download the driver releasing later this week, which applies the same fix.
While this hopefully means the issues are being corrected across all affected cards, it's been another PR black eye for Nvidia.
The RTX 5000 series has been called one of the worst graphics card launches in memory. Not only have there been disappointing generational upgrades, almost non-existent stock levels, and high prices, but we've also seen the melting cable connector problem return and cards with missing ROP units.
It was reported yesterday that the RTX 5080 has joined the list of cards with missing ROPs, making one wonder why Nvidia never mentioned this fact when acknowledging some RTX 5090 and 5070 Ti cards were affected. Nvidia, of course, makes most of its money from its data center products, so maybe the company just doesn't care.
Nvidia confirms black screen fix for RTX 5000 graphics cards, driver update coming this week
