Grab Nvidia and AMD’s new GPU drivers here to save your CPU and maybe even your Windows install

It was only a matter of time before AMD and Nvidia responded to their bad driver days, and both have dropped a new release on the same day which should mitigate problems with both Radeon and GeForce GPUs. Though one is an actual fix, the other just bakes in a previously announced workaround.

Nvidia’s new 531.26 GeForce Hotfix driver is dedicated to ridding its users of an annoying bug that caused the Nvidia Container software to eat up more than its fair share of CPU resources on exiting a game. 

We only reported on the double GPU driver issue a couple of days ago, so it hasn’t taken the green team long to address it. The earlier workarounds were none to onerous, to be fair—either rolling back to a previous driver or just ending the Nvidia Container task in Task Manager—but it’s good to see it being nixed entirely. I’ve certainly not noticed any abnormal CPU usage since updating my system anyways.

How do I download the Nvidia 531.26 GeForce Hotfix driver?

You’ll need to navigate to Nvidia’s customer help pages here to find the download link at the moment. As it’s a hotfix you won’t necessarily find it popping up as an update in GeForce Experience, or via the driver search pages on Nvidia’s own sites, so this is currently the only place to find it.

It’s a light touch driver update with only a couple of notes:

GeForce hotfix display driver version 531.26 is based on our latest Game Ready Driver 531.18.

This hotfix addresses the following issues:

Higher CPU usage from NVIDIA Container might be observed after exiting a game[Notebook] Random bugcheck may be observed on certain laptops with GeForce GTX 10/MX250/350 series GPUs

On the other side of the GPU divide is AMD with a potentially far more catastrophic driver bug, though one which isn’t necessarily the red team’s fault. 

It’s a rare issue where Windows can get all bullish about software updates and if it decides to run some sort of update process while the Radeon Adrenalin software is also updating it can lead to a total corruption of a Windows installation.

Not good. The workaround is far less straightforward than with the Nvidia bug, and requires using a System Restore point to get your OS back up and running. Though that’s easier said than done and reportedly requires hitting the power button at a required picosecond between BIOS options and Windows trying to boot in order to force the automated recovery process.

There is a prophylactic measure, however, to ensure it doesn’t happen to you when you update, which is to disable the Factory Reset option in the Adrenalin installer. This stops the software from basically doing a clean install of the GPU drivers. From the latest version of Adrenalin, version 23.3.1, supporting both the release of Wo Long: Fallen Dynasty and the Halo Infinite ray tracing update, that has been temporarily disabled anyways.

This ought to stop the ultra-rare, but painfully destructive bug from happening again.

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