“Blackscreen of Death”: More and more older Nvidia GPUs struggle with black screens

While the focus at Nvidia Geforce is on the current RTX-5000 generation, complaints about driver problems with older models are piling up.

Since the beginning of the RTX-50 generation, reports have been piling up that specifically the new GPUs are plagued by screens that remain black.

In its shadow, however, this problem also spread to the predecessor series: on social media, more and more users are complaining about black screens with GPUs from the RTX 4000 and RTX 3000 generations, which have been occurring more frequently for several weeks:

PSA: Nvidia Widespread Black Screen or Hard OS Crash Issues on 4xxx (or older) Series Cards Need To Be Widely Known & Fixed.
byu/Scotty1992 inhardware

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• The black screen problems seem to originate in the first Blackwell driver, because the reports usually start with a variation of “I’ve had problems since the Geforce driver 572.xx”.
• The first driver with a version number starting with 572 was released on January 30, 2025 – just in time for the release of the RTX 5090 and RTX 5080.
• Accordingly, the new Blackwell generation can also be found in the context of community feedback: While the aforementioned black screen issues with RTX 5000 GPUs were repeatedly addressed via driver hotfix, problems are also cropping up for owners of older graphics cards. Understandably, no one is particularly happy about this.

Black screens on RTX 4000 and older: Possible solution

It is not possible to clearly identify a single cause for the problems. Based on various workarounds, speculation ranges from G-Sync errors to frame generation to possible compatibility issues with Windows 11 24H2.

• For most affected users, however, one process seems to promise the greatest success: Using the tool called “Display Driver Uninstaller” (DDU), the faulty Geforce driver can be completely removed.
• Afterwards, you can switch to a version before the RTX 5000 release, provided it starts with 566.XX.

The catch with this approach is that you have to do without the features that Nvidia promised with the arrival of the new generation. These include the new Transformer model and DLSS support for current games.

We have contacted Nvidia and asked if they are aware of the issues and are working on them. If we receive a response, you will find out on GlobalESportNews