Report: RTX 50 series GPUs get noticeable boost in benchmarks with latest drivers, gaming performance suffers

Nvidia released the 576.02 driver update alongside the RTX 5060 Ti GPUs on April 16. It is available for all RTX GPUs but it seems to be offering a performance boost to the 50 series cards, at least in synthetic benchmarks. Several users have reported that their cards are benchmarking noticeably higher, anywhere from 3% to 8%. On the other hand, there are also users reporting instability in games, claiming issues with the thermal sensors brought on by the latest drivers.

The latest Nvidia driver update has a dedicated PDF for the release notes that mention several gaming related fixes and general bug fixes, including the black screen issues some RTX 50 series users were facing. More interestingly, some users noticed that their GPUs were getting better performance in synthetic benchmarks, reporting gains, in some cases, of up to 6%.

German digital publication Computer Base did a 3D Mark test for all RTX 50 series GPUs, including the RTX 5060 Ti, and found that the RTX 5070 and higher cards showed performance gains between 6% and 8% with the new drivers compared to the launch drivers.

Furthermore, some users reportedly noticed lower power consumption by up to 7W because the clock speed went all the way down to 22 MHz when the card was sitting idle. Videocardz benchmarked an RTX 4090 in 3D Mark Steel Nomad but noticed only a 1 FPS improvement, suggesting the synthetic benchmark performance boost is only affecting RTX 50 series cards.

However, the story is quite different when it comes to gaming performance. Several users on Reddit shared that they noticed performance instability with the new drivers. One user shared that their GPU was showing “weird clock behavior” with fluctuations in frame rates leading to stutters, while others noticed higher clock speeds but with higher temperatures. Apparently, there is a bug with the thermal sensors caused by the new drivers that is pushing clocks to go higher than they should and also preventing thermal monitoring software from reporting accurate data.

Because of these reported instability issues, it would be ideal to hold off on updating to the latest drivers especially for RTX 50 series users. However, those experiencing black screen issues would need to update, or roll back to an older stable version.