Yesterday, Nvidia ran out a critical hotfix to contain fallout from previous driver releases that caused alarms across the AI and gaming community by accidentally reporting safe GPU temperatures.
In the official Nvidia post on the hotfix release, there is only one third of the list of fixes listed, but the issue is cited as ‘.The GPU monitoring utility may stop reporting GPU temperature after the PC wakes up from sleep..
Immediately after the impacted Game Lady Driver 576.02 was unveiled, the pinning thread of stable diffusion subreddit is entitled Read to save your GPU!anecdotal issues and user-reported updates for new drivers. From these, and other reports on the web, you can establish a timeline for some of the emergency issues.
The first Reddit report of the bug appears to have occurred late on Friday afternoon on Zephyrusg14 Subreddit. Here, user Fricy81 quoted a post from the NVIDIA Forum (Archives).
NVIDIA Forum users will find the issue after updating 576.02. Source: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/game-ready-drivers/13/563010/geforce-grd-57602-feedback-thread-releade-41625/3524072/
After installing driver updates, Nvidia Forum users can use tools such as MSI Afterburner and in-game monitors. call of duty (The GPU panel in the Task Manager normally accesses the native system measurements, as does Windows) stopped updating GPU temperature measurements and frozen at around 35-36°C.
Restarting the monitoring software has no effect, the user states, and only a complete system reboot will restore accurate readings. Tools such as Hwinfo and Nvidia’s own monitoring app continued to report temperature correctly. Users emphasized that problems occurred not only after the system woke up from sleep, but also during normal use.
User feedback on various forums highlighted the general confusion in normal fan curve behavior and changes in core thermal regulation, and as detailed in this comment, it highlighted unexpectedly idling the idle unit at high temperatures and surprisingly overheating under what is usually considered a standard operating load.
“I could tell that something was off. The weather outside was probably around 55°F/12°C, but I was cooking alive in my room. My windows were open, but still I couldn’t feel the difference. All the fans were running at Max, but at first the temperature looked good. For a while, I was surrounded by 68°C to 72°C after playing the game.
“At first, that seemed normal. Until the next morning, I realized that they weren’t neglecting temperatures and that the fans were still (kicking).
“After fixing a few things recently, I was doing some AI overclocking, so I wasn’t sure if the value was too high. After installing Asus AI Suite 3, it happened once before – BIOS settings don’t work properly for that reason.
“Anyway, I went ahead and returned to being an older driver for now.”
Semi-optimal
The official release PDF for the 576.02 driver update provides some clues regarding changes that may have contributed to the new issue. In section 5.5, Nvidia acknowledges that GPU temperatures can be misreported in Nvidia. Optimus A system is a system that displays zero degrees when an application is not running.
Section 5.5 of the official 576.02 update note addresses the issue of temperature monitoring that appears to have affected more systems than the Optimus system. Source: https://us.download.nvidia.com/windows/576.02/576.02-win11-win10-RELEASE-NOTES.pdf
The releases are as follows:
5.5 GPU temperatures are incorrectly reported on Optimus systems
5.5.1 Problem
In Optimus Systems, temperature reporting tools such as Speccy and GPU-Z report that the NVIDIA GPU temperature is zero when the application is not running.
5.5.2 Description
Optimus Systems will be in a low power state if no Nvidia GPU is used. This causes the temperature reporting tool to return the wrong value. Because the temperature of the GPU changes, when you wake up the GPU and check the temperature, you will get a meaningless measurement.
These tools report the exact temperature only if the GPU is awake and running.
NVIDIA Optimus is a GPU switching technology that switches integrated and discrete graphics based on application demand to automatically balance performance and power balance, designed to save battery life and reduce power consumption. For tasks like gaming or HD video playback, Optimus activates discrete GPUs to improve performance. For light activities like web browsing, you will be reverting to integrated (onboard) graphics.
This update appears to have extended behavior previously limited to Optimus systems, allowing the affected GPU to enter a low power state while idle, even if it is not hosted on the Optimus system, destroying temperature reporting on third-party tools.
Risk adjustment
It is safe to say that in most scenarios, the VBIOS on the graphics card is likely to be preventing permanent GPU damage. VBIOS implements thermal and power limits at the firmware level, independent of the driver.
So, even if the driver causes improper fan operation or incorrect temperatures, VBIOS should either throttle performance, increase fan activity, or shut down the GPU to prevent hardware failure.
That doesn’t mean that the risk is trivial. Sustained high temperatures can degrade performance over time and stress adjacent components. Furthermore, without the general understanding that the updated driver caused the problem (especially on systems where the driver is updated “quietly”), issues in this nature can lead to attempting remedies for issues that do not exist, or misleading most affected users who may apply unrelated “fixes” to damage the system.
The erroneous behavior caused by update 576.02 has been particularly wary of those engaged in artificial intelligence workflows where high-performance hardware is routinely pushed into heat restrictions for a long period of time.
The problematic 576.02 driver affected the rash of wider complaints despite initial reports that some beneficial performance improvements were provided after its release in mid-April. Despite the Hotfix regulations and the level of confusion that caused by 576.02, at the time of writing it is still available for download* on the Nvidia site.
afterglow
Many types of damage and inconvenience have been reported when it comes to fallout from a failed update. User Frankie_T9000 reported that the GPU crashed in the boot due to heat buildup under fault updates. He commented.”It appears to be harmless forever, but you should resend as soon as possible (there is a pad on Wednesday). Older thermal pastes are more matured by heat buildup, so we put new paste pads on them.‘
Yesterday, another user on the same thread stated: “I’m using a custom fan curve with my MSI Afterburner and I keep showing that the GPU temperature is constantly at 27°C, so the fan isn’t on. I thought it was my problem, but after installing the previous drivers it all worked again. Also, Themps showed correctly in TaskManager.
Although NVIDIA (as stated persistently in each hotfix release), it often offers hotfixes for certain video games and platforms, the risk of thermal damage to the GPU or surrounding heat damage is higher for AI practitioners than for video gummers. It’s a boss battle or a particularly demanding map section, but otherwise designed as a compromise between GPU exploitation and system stability.
*Archive: https://archive.ph/ylvr1
First released on Tuesday, April 22, 2025
