Question Crazy Driver - A Story About Nvidia Madness
Question Crazy Driver - A Story About Nvidia Madness
Let me explain this situation to you clearly.
There were several instances where I encountered problems with Nvidia Game Ready Drivers. Initially, drivers 466.47 and above caused the GPU to operate at extremely high speeds—often exceeding 1900MHz—during basic tasks like using Autocad, Revit, Sketchup, Facebook Messenger, Adobe Premier Pro, and even when multiple monitors were active. While games performed adequately under these settings, the unexpected fluctuations in GPU usage were concerning. Moving the mouse across open documents would cause the GPU to spike to 100% usage abruptly, which was not typical behavior. Eventually, reverting to driver 466.47 resolved the issue.
Later, after an update to driver 496.13, the problem disappeared—games ran smoothly without any unusual desktop activity. However, I did notice some performance drops in certain games, especially Guardians of the Galaxy, which made the game stutter significantly. The GPU would rapidly increase and then drop back, making the experience very frustrating. I recorded these fluctuations using MSI Afterburner, observing consistent dips at regular intervals, with the most severe impact on GOTG.
The solution was a simple restart, which normalized the GPU usage to a stable level of 98-99%, allowing games to run without issues. It’s worth noting that I had disabled fastboot in Windows 10 since May last year after an unusual boot failure.
After upgrading to driver 497.29, the issue vanished—games ran smoothly with only minor fluctuations. However, the abnormal GPU behavior reappeared after a restart, and even then, the dips persisted, especially during load tasks like gaming or rendering.
This situation raises questions: is it solely a driver problem, or could there be another underlying cause?
I don't think so. I just switched the driver from 497.29 to the latest Studio version 511.09, and it's functioning smoothly for my work applications. The GPU clock and usage are behaving exactly as expected. I'm not sure if I should try gaming with it, maybe start with something simple. They mention having two driver types, but they clearly recommend using Game Ready drivers when you use the machine for both work and play. It's probably not harming my computer more than playing a game, but the strange behavior bothers me.