NVIDIA is not having a good time with its recent drivers. Not long ago, the company had to withdraw its latest driver release because it caused problems with fan control. It has now been discovered that those same drivers were also reducing the voltage of graphics cards.
Early reports confirmed that the GeForce RTX 40 series was heavily affected. In some cases, the GeForce RTX 4090 reduced its power draw to 250 watts in Resident Evil Requiem, losing half of its performance. The issue was fixed by installing older drivers, which confirmed that the problem was software-related and not a hardware fault.
NVIDIA later released the Game Ready 595.71 WHQL drivers, claiming they fixed these problems. However, it turns out that voltage issues may still be present — this time affecting the GeForce RTX 50 series.
New Driver Limits Voltage on GeForce RTX 5090
A video test shows that the new driver limits voltage scaling on the GeForce RTX 5090. This directly impacts overclocking and prevents the card from reaching higher speeds.
The user who shared the video explained that before installing the new drivers, their RTX 5090 was able to exceed 3 GHz on the GPU with a voltage of around 1 volt. After installing the latest drivers, the card no longer reaches 3 GHz, and the voltage stays below 1 volt.
This behavior suggests that the driver is restricting voltage, which reduces performance and limits overclocking potential.
The problem has also been confirmed by other outlets, including WCCFTech, which was able to reproduce the issue on its own test system.
NVIDIA appears to be struggling with driver stability, as several recent versions have introduced errors despite not including major changes. Users affected by these problems may need to roll back to older drivers until a proper fix is released.
