Nvidia driver bug can make your CPU harder after closing your game

Enlarge / Nvidia's GeForce RTX 4080. Andrew Cunningham

Nvidia has released a new driver update for its GeForce graphics cards which, among other things, introduced a new video super resolution scaling technology that could improve the appearance of low resolution videos on high resolution screens. But the driver (version 531.18) also apparently came with a bug that caused high CPU usage on some PCs after running and then closing a game.

Nvidia has released a driver fix (version 531.26) that acknowledges and should resolve the issue, which was apparently caused by an undisclosed bug in the "Nvidia container", a process that exists primarily to contain other bundled processes with Nvidia. Drivers. It also fixes a "random bugcheck" issue that may affect some older laptops with GeForce 1000 series or MX250 and MX350 GPUs.

Not all PCs running the new Nvidia drivers were affected by the bug: some journalists observed the behavior on their systems, while others did not. Even relatively low CPU utilization in the 10-15% range can have a noticeable impact on performance, removing CPU cycles from other tasks and preventing the CPU from going into an idle state. This generates more heat and consumes more power and can also affect the battery life of laptops.

Another recent software bug in Nvidia's drivers caused games to run slower when the Discord app was running in the background; an application profile issue was preventing GPU memory from reaching its maximum clock speeds, reducing frame rates as a result. This fix can be pushed silently in the background on PCs running Nvidia software, but installing the fix for the CPU usage bug requires you to download and install Nvidia's typical 850MB driver package. /p>