- Nvidia GPUs suffer since Windows 11 October Update
- Microsoft patch meant some PC games ran slower than expected
- Nvidia has rolled out an emergency patch to address these issues
Nvidia GPU owners who experienced 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 patch – outside of its normal stream of graphics driver updates – that addresses levels of “lower performance” with some games after Windows 11’s October patch (codenamed KB5066835).
Now, this only happens with certain games, and Nvidia is keeping things vague here, in terms of “lower performance” and what exactly that could mean – probably slower frame rates and, therefore, less smooth gameplay.
Obviously, for an emergency patch to be implemented in this manner, Nvidia must consider this an urgent issue.
If you’ve been having issues with PC games running slower since last month’s Windows 11 update (or maybe even this month’s), you might want to jump on this fix – but there are caveats attached to a fix, as I’ll explain below.
Analysis: patch now or wait?
As Nvidia makes clear, a patch was hastily released for a tricky bug that’s causing difficulty for gamers with GeForce GPUs, and as such it requires a much shorter round of testing and quality assurance. In other words, it could be problematic, just like any beta update (like an optional Windows 11 update).
This fix will be included in the next full release of the Nvidia driver in a more fully tested form, so if you don’t really notice any major issues with your games and the Nvidia GPU, your best bet is to wait for this driver. It won’t be very far, after all.
However, if you are experiencing performance issues that are causing you serious problems, then yes, patching is probably the right decision. Even if there are some unintended side effects related to this patch, chances are they won’t be as bad as serious frame rate issues.
Early feedback on Reddit suggests that this patch has indeed fixed lower than expected frame rates with some games (AShadows of Assassin’s Creed is mentioned), but it did nothing for the reported monitor flickering issues (screen goes black for about a second), which is probably a separate bugbear.
There may also be other issues afoot in terms of gaming-related performance issues with this Windows 11 update, as Windows Latest notes that AMD and Intel PCs have also experienced issues. The October Update also torpedoed the Windows Recovery Environment (which allows attempting recovery from a boot failure) and Microsoft itself rolled out an emergency patch to resolve this bug.
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