Nvidia today confirmed that it is working to fix a driver issue that is causing high CPU usage and Blue Screens of Death (BSODs) on Windows systems.
The faulty driver is the GeForce Game Ready 531.18 WHQL driver released on February 28th, which introduced support for RTX Video Super Resolution.
This comes after customers have been complaining for days on the company’s forums and social media about the Nvidia Game Session Telemetry Plugin (NvGSTPlugin.dll) loaded by the Nvidia Display Container service causing CPU spikes of 10 % or more on Windows systems runs games or rendering apps.
In the Nvidia forums thread asking for feedback on this driver version, users also report that they have persistent blue screens on recent Windows installs and that rolling back to an older driver version fixes the BSOD issues.
“After doing a ‘clean install’ of this latest driver on a Lenovo P17 with fully updated Windows 11 and an NVIDIA RTX A5000, I then encountered 3 hard kernel crashes (BSOD) and 2 game crashes (Hogwarts Legacy). for three days I ran this version,” said one user.
“I didn’t have any of these issues prior to this version, and after reverting to the previous version I have yet to encounter one of the issues; it seems that this driver version is the clear culprit (please let me know if I can provide a diagnosis this would help solve the problem).”
Bug fix coming tomorrow
Nvidia has already added this to its list of open issues for this driver release, stating that “higher CPU usage by NVIDIA Container may be observed after exiting a game”.
According to SPM Sean Pelletier of GeForce Game Ready Drivers, a fix is in the works and will be released tomorrow in the form of a hotfix driver.
Until the issue is resolved, users can kill the NVIDIA container process from Windows Task Manager to get rid of the overall OS lag.
If you’re also experiencing Windows BSODs, game crashes, reduced in-game performance, and in some cases games not starting, consider reverting to your older driver.
For this you have to go through this procedure on Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices:
Click on the “Start” button. Search for “Device Manager” and open it. Double-click Graphics Cards. Double click on your NVIDIA GPU. Select the “Drivers” tab. Click on “Roll back driver”.
