Nvidia 545.84 driver can crash system under GPU load

[SaperPL]

Summary

Nvidia 545.84 driver seems to cause many issues ranging from flickering black boxes on the screen, application crashes and full system crash when GPU load is spiking.

 

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reddit thread accounts that rolling back to 537.58 fixes problems or just that the issues started occurring after driver update:

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after updating to the new driver (545.84), game has been experiencing screen flickering in the form of solid black textures for some places (New Atlantis heavily) & CTD’s as well as frame skipping after some time playing.

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To completely fix the flickering, crashing and other graphical issues, start windows in safe mode (IMPORTANT) use DDU to uninstall your driver, and then install the previous driver (537.58) and make sure to clear your shader cache.

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Crash here too. I reverted back to the previous and everything is working.

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I experienced pc crashing and rebooting.

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Yes me too .. was an headache to come back to work my laptop! really i don't recommend to install this driver!

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Can confirm, 4090 and i9 13900k ran fine for over 100hrs now I crash after 10 min of playtime with artifacts and flickering

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I don't play Starfield yet, but can confirm that it's happening to lots of other games too. I've came across other Reddit-communities of games with the same kind of issue.

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defiantly the nvidia driver. Rolled back and no issues.

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same for 3080, after about 15 minutes of playtime my game blackscreened and all the audio did the funny buzz and pc crashed, happened multiple times and with other games before reverting drivers.

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I went back to the previous driver and it worked fine. Today I went back to windows 11 from windows 10 fresh installed with the latest driver and didn't have any problems yet. I think it's a combination of things. Nvidia drivers are not what they used to be also new games come out in a bad shape.

After I went back to the previous driver all the artifacts were gone. Bit with the new driver and windows 11 I don't see any artifacts in battlefield either.

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It was actually crashing all my games not just starfield. Played d4, starfield and Forza Motorsport and every game crashed. Finally realized that was the only difference from a week ago…rolled back the drivers and no issues.

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Google led me here after 2 days of my display and system hanging while playing Star Citizen (I didn't even type that into Google, just Nvidia 545.84 crashing).

Process of elimination, I updated my drivers then.

I checked my system logs and it pointed to Nvidia drivers and display errors.

Like another post said, we are all paying for this one it seems.

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same here.. whit new drivers i've black artifact flickering on monitor whit gtx1080ti ,roll back to 537.58 and it's ok.

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I had the same exact issue with my RTX 4080. I also use the DLSS mod. I got impatient and just downloaded the previous Nvidia driver and installed it manually. Seems to have fixed it, I think. I didn't even uninstall anything. Do I still need to go back and actually do a proper clean install?

Multiple quotes with similar issues can be found on nvidia driver feedback thread as well, just people don't discuss rolling back to previous driver there.

 

My thoughts

I stumbled upon this because I had this issue. Initially I thought it was a CPU issue (recently upgraded) or GPU issue (started thinking my old RTX2070 is failing) because I started having some flickering black boxes on the screen while watching videos in browser and had a system crash two times recently, but yesterday I started having repeatable crashes and today I had 100% repro on launching a game. Found the reddit thread, tried just changing the driver through geforce experience to the creator version that is previous driver version and it didn't solve the problem, but doing a proper cleaning with DDU and installation of previous GRD version did fix it.

 

What is noticeable is that I had a 100% repro that was shutting down my PSU completely when launching a game, not a system crash and reboot, but my PSU did shut down completely and I had to start the system again with power button. And I have a system configuration that should be okay on 400W PSU, that is running on 700W Gold PSU that's barely 2 years old. Multiple people are stating just restarts, so maybe my case of full shut down is unique for some reason.

 

I suspect that the driver may be causing some audio crackling issues as well, which started happening for me around the same time, but it's too soon for me to tell if this issue is gone.

 

I think this is important to be publicised both for people to know about the issue and avoid this driver and also to put some focus of nvidia driver team on solving the situation quickly.

 

Sources

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/528784/geforce-grd-54584-feedback-thread-released-101723/

[Arika]

*laughs in studio drivers*

[Dr_Whom]

Weird, I wonder if my issue is actually the driver then. I updated to it prior to playing Cities Skylines 2. Less than 10 minutes of in game would result in crash to desktop. Thought it was CPU OC at first so set that back to stock but same thing. Went into reliability history and discovered it was producing bug check 141 (video engine timeout). Set my GPU OC (that's been stable in everything else for over a year now) back to stock and it fixed it. My OC was also undervolted so I went back to it but upped the voltage from .982 to .993 and it's been fine.

[porina]

Looks like I installed this version 9 days ago. I use my PC daily for gaming and other tasks, and in that time I've only had one CTD when loading a map in Cities Skylines 2, so I'm not even sure if it is the game, driver, or something else. Not saying there isn't a problem for some people. It may not be widespread and there may be specific circumstances triggering it.

[SaperPL]

9 minutes ago, porina said:

Looks like I installed this version 9 days ago. I use my PC daily for gaming and other tasks, and in that time I've only had one CTD when loading a map in Cities Skylines 2, so I'm not even sure if it is the game, driver, or something else. Not saying there isn't a problem for some people. It may not be widespread and there may be specific circumstances triggering it.

I could play it for most of the time as well, but had like one or two system crashes in the meantime that I assumed were something else, until yesterday when it started happening constantly.

 

My first guess is that there's something in the driver shader cache that might be accumulating over time with this new driver and depending on when this issue happens and how often this thing from shader cache is accessed, it may affect whether this crashes the application, whole system or whether you'll just have minor artifact etc.

 

My second guess is that it may be affecting people who did not do a proper clean driver install for a long time and there's some wierd juxtaposition against some leftover things from some older driver.

[Kisai]

13 minutes ago, porina said:

Looks like I installed this version 9 days ago. I use my PC daily for gaming and other tasks, and in that time I've only had one CTD when loading a map in Cities Skylines 2, so I'm not even sure if it is the game, driver, or something else. Not saying there isn't a problem for some people. It may not be widespread and there may be specific circumstances triggering it.

I suspect it might be certain models, as, I've seen some BSOD's on recent driver versions, but only after the game had been running for 8+ hours.

 

The only way to confirm is by having people use something like bluescreenview

If you don't see NV files in there, it's likely not the Nvidia driver.

 

But also any crashes that cause the boot drive to be ejected won't be recorded. So you have to pay attention when you actually see the BSOD to try and remember what it was caused by.

 

At any rate, before you go "it's old man nvidia driver" make sure to check what the BSOD is.

 

[SaperPL]

7 minutes ago, Kisai said:

The only way to confirm is by having people use something like bluescreenview

The thing is, those crashes are not bluescreens, at least in my case nothing from yesterday/today is visible in bluescreenview.

It's like the GPU is doing something that triggers some kind of failsafe protection (in the PSU?), so the system doesn't even have time to log anything.

[porina]

545.92 just got released primarily for Alan Wake 2. Someone can go through the notes and see if there is anything else applicable there.

https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/545.92/545.92-win11-win10-release-notes.pdf

 

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, porina said:

545.92 just got released primarily for Alan Wake 2. Someone can go through the notes and see if there is anything else applicable there.

https://us.download.nvidia.com/Windows/545.92/545.92-win11-win10-release-notes.pdf

 

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Introduces support for RTX Video Super Resolution v1.5

I suppose there is a possibility that this potentially explains it, since it keep the that part of the chip constantly active when watching youtube, or seeing any video ads if you have it turned on. (I never turned it on.)

 

That can have consequences if you leave your web browser open while having it open. This was something I suspected *could* happen. But I express doubt this is it.

 

[PhantomJaguarr]

6 hours ago, SaperPL said:

My second guess is that it may be affecting people who did not do a proper clean driver install for a long time and there's some wierd juxtaposition against some leftover things from some older driver.

I had used DDU with the previous driver and I have had no issues so far with the current one, so far. 

[StDragon]

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

That can have consequences if you leave your web browser open while having it open. This was something I suspected *could* happen. But I express doubt this is it.

Possible. Though I make it a point to enable it in the NVIDIA Control Panel when in video watching mood, and disable it again when not needed. Figure it's best to not leave it enabled all the time.

I haven't any issues with crashing with the latest drivers after playing hours of Halo Infinite

[Quackers101]

what makes this more fun is that more third party softwares do this too, with some hard crashes. stacking them and you will have a good time.

so I hate that software wants to do so much, it gives a bad experience for things you paid extra for.

[williamcll]

For long term use, is there good old driver if I don't care about ray tracing and AI?

[Stahlmann]

38 minutes ago, williamcll said:

For long term use, is there good old driver if I don't care about ray tracing and AI?

If you don't play the latest games, then just use DDU and install the studio driver. No need to go back to 3 year old drivers to get a stable experience.

 

In my case the newest driver doesn't cause any problems. Even when playing games that are 100% GPU bound, there is no instability on my end.

[Mark Kaine]

20 hours ago, williamcll said:

For long term use, is there good old driver if I don't care about ray tracing and AI?

 

 

no issues whatsoever (of course raytracing would still work, but why would anyone use this trash? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯) 

[Maticks]

I am on 545.92 so did Nvidia fix this issue?

[RejZoR]

On 10/27/2023 at 10:51 AM, williamcll said:

For long term use, is there good old driver if I don't care about ray tracing and AI?

I always use latest version and have old one still on my drive if I have any problems. So far I've only had like 2-3 in all the years. Mostly minor issues like Youtube video tearing or artefacting and that was years ago on GTX 1080Ti. Haven't really had any issues on RTX 3080 that I can remember.