- Nvidia GPUs have suffered since the Windows 11 October update
- Microsoft patch meant some PC games ran slower than expected
- Nvidia has implemented an emergency hotfix to resolve these issues.
Nvidia GPU owners who have been experiencing slowness issues affecting some games over the past month now have a fix for these performance issues in Windows 11.
Windows Latest reports that Nvidia has just released a hotfix, outside of its normal flow of graphics driver updates, that resolves “lower performance” levels with some games following the Windows 11 October patch (codenamed KB5066835).
Now, this only happens with some games, and Nvidia is keeping things vague here, in terms of “lower performance” and exactly what that could mean: presumably slower frame rates and, as a result, less fluid games.
Clearly, for an emergency fix to be implemented in this way, Nvidia must consider it an urgent issue.
If you’ve been having trouble with PC games running slower since last month’s Windows 11 update (or maybe even this month’s), you might want to take advantage of this patch, but there are caveats attached to a hotfix, as I’ll discuss below.
Analysis: patch now or wait?
As Nvidia makes clear, a hotfix was quickly released for a complicated bug that is causing misery for gamers with a GeForce GPU and, as such, has a much shorter testing and QA duration. In other words, it could be problematic, like any beta update (like an optional Windows 11 update).
This fix will be included in the next full version of the Nvidia driver in a more tested form, so if you don’t really notice any major issues with your games and Nvidia GPU, your best bet is to wait for that driver. After all, it won’t be far away.
However, if you have performance issues that are causing you serious problems, then yes, a hotfix is probably the right decision. Even if there are unwanted side effects with this patch, they will most likely not be as serious as the serious frame rate issues.
Early comments on Reddit suggest that this fix has indeed fixed lower than expected frame rates in some games (AAssassin’s Creed mentioned), but it hasn’t done anything about the reported issues with monitor flickering (the screen goes black for about a second), which is presumably a separate issue.
There may also be other issues in terms of gaming-related performance issues with this Windows 11 update, as Windows Latest notes that AMD and Intel PCs have also encountered issues. The October update also torpedoed the Windows Recovery Environment (which helps you try to recover from a boot error) and Microsoft itself rolled out an emergency patch to resolve that error.
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