Nvidia rushes out a driver fix after its own update broke games
Nvidia's February driver release was, to put it plainly, a mess. The 595.59 update shipped with clock speed anomalies, broken fan detection, and enough in-game freezes to send RTX 5000 owners reaching for rollback guides. Now, roughly a month later, the company has pushed GeForce 595.97 WHQL — a corrective patch that reads less like a feature drop and more like a public apology written in code.
What the 595.97 update actually fixes
The most visible repair involves Halo Infinite. The R595 driver series had been degrading texture quality in the game, a regression that should never have made it past internal QA. It did. The 595.97 patch addresses it, though the fact that this is the second time the R595 family has introduced this specific problem raises a question Nvidia hasn't publicly answered: why does the same bug keep slipping through?
HITMAN World of Assassination users were dealing with persistent flickering — the kind of visual stutter that makes a game actively unpleasant to sit in front of. That's resolved here. Smooth Motion, Nvidia's frame interpolation technology, was also causing unexpected mid-session crashes. Fixed. The more technically significant repair, though, is the DLSS Frame Generation conflict with Instant Replay: previously, running both simultaneously would freeze and then close the game entirely. That's the sort of bug that erodes trust in a feature Nvidia has been aggressively pushing as a selling point for its latest hardware generation.
The problems nvidia admits it still hasn't solved
The release notes are transparent about what remains broken, and that transparency is worth acknowledging. Enshroudedstill suffers from terrain disappearing in specific map zones. Arknights: Endfield continues to stutter. Nvidia says fixes are in progress. Whether those fixes arrive in a timely 595.x patch or get quietly folded into the next major branch is, for now, an open question the company hasn't answered.
For RTX 5000 series owners playing any of the affected titles, updating is straightforward logic. For everyone else — the broad middle of the user base who hasn't touched Halo Infinite or HITMAN recently — the 595.97 release doesn't introduce new features compelling enough to make the update mandatory. Check the driver tab in the Nvidia app or pull it directly from Nvidia's official site. Skip the third-party driver repositories entirely; that's a shortcut that tends to create more problems than it solves.
What this episode really illustrates is the tension Nvidia is navigating right now. The company is pushing an aggressive hardware and software roadmap — DLSS 5, new GPU architectures, frame generation as a core experience feature — while simultaneously shipping driver updates that break basic functionality for existing customers. The 595.97 patch closes some of those gaps. But a corrective release that exists primarily to undo damage from the previous corrective release is not a sign of a pipeline running smoothly.