Updating your PC to the latest Nvidia GeForce Game Ready driver, namely version 616.56, can put your monitor at risk of flickering. Nvidia has acknowledged the issue and says it’s actively working to address the problem. While it’s possible to dodge this bothersome side effect by rolling back to a prior version, there are workarounds you can exercise for the moment.
Reports of flickering and discoloration are currently flooding the official feedback thread for driver 616.56, with Nvidia staffer Manuel@Nvidia stating that the firm is “testing a fix for this.” This time, we can’t expect a hotfix, as we saw previous problematic releases, with the company planning on deploying the fix via a subsequent driver.
Nvidia plans to release a new driver on 3 September, to coincide with the launch of DLSS 5. However, this won’t contain the fix for flickering monitors, as the company finalised the code for that release a week earlier. Instead, you can expect the patch for this issue to arrive on 10 September at the earliest.
Some users claim to have been able to circumvent the flickering by switching to 10-bit colour via the Nvidia app. Alternatively, using Windows Automatic Colour Management (ACM) appears to have proven similarly successful. I’d recommend most people take the latter route, particularly if you’re unsure whether your monitor is even capable of displaying a 10-bit signal.
Realistically, though, unless you’re playing one of the games that this driver affects, namely Doom: The Dark Ages, Hell Let Loose: Vietnam, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy, or Star Wars Zero Company, there’s no harm in rolling back to 610.88 and waiting for a full fix. You can do so via the Drivers tab in the Nvidia app, or downloading the prior version manually.
If you’re concerned about losing access to Nvidia DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction via a rollback, there’s nothing to worry about. So long as you’re running a driver that’s at least as new as version 580.88, you’ll still have access to the latest ray tracing denoiser.
