Nvidia’s GPU driver ‘totally wrecked’ user overclocks, but a hotfix has just been released that puts things right

Just another buggy Nvidia driver

06 Mar 2026, 14:48 · TechRadar

News By Alex Blake published 6 March 2026

(Image credit: NVIDIA)

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Nvidia’s 595.71 driver broke overclocking for graphics card users
The driver limited GPU voltages, leading to underperformance
Nvidia has just released a hotfix that addresses the issue

Normally, undervolting your graphics card requires plenty of careful tinkering, benchmarking and adjusting in order to get everything precisely right. It’s not something that is forced on you or comes about unexpectedly, yet that seems to be exactly what happened to many Nvidia customers who upgraded some of the best GPUs to the company’s 595.71 driver. Fortunately, although it had an impact on real-world gaming performance, a fix is now available.

The issue was reported by VideoCardz, with the outlet noting that early feedback from the 595.71 driver had included reports of “core voltage and boost behavior changing, with many claiming a ceiling around 0.95 to 0.975V and clocks that stop around 2,955 to 2,985MHz, or around 3,000MHz, even after applying manual overclocks.”

In other words, users’ overclocking abilities appeared to be limited by the software update. This apparently wasn’t in evidence before the customers installed the 595.71 driver. While the problem didn’t appear to be limited to one graphics card in particular, it did only seem to affect those from the RTX 50 series.

Users were not happy. On the official Nvidia support forums, for example, user bloodknight2012 said their custom overclock was “totally wrecked” by the driver. The forums were filled with similar comments from disgruntled customers, suggesting the issue might have been widespread.

At the time, it wasn’t clear if this was a bug or a deliberate decision by Nvidia. If it was the latter, there was speculation that it might have been done to prevent the kind of overheating issues that have plagued high-end Nvidia graphics cards in recent years.

Yet the absence of any mention of the imposed undervolting in the release notes for the 595.71 driver hinted that it was not something Nvidia was aware of. And with the issuing of a patch in the latest 595.76 hotfix, it seems evident that the problem was a bug all along.

A fix is available

(Image credit: Future / John Loeffler)

Nvidia users have had to put up with more than their fair share of driver issues in recent months, with huge piles of bug fixes being issued and repeated updates failing to fix underlying problems. It got so bad that we were terrified of installing the drivers on our own machines in case something went wrong.

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