NVIDIA's Latest 576.02 WHQL Driver Add Up to 8% Performance Bump in Synthetic Benchmarks

[AleksandarK]

NVIDIA's latest GeForce 576.02 WHQL driver, released on April 16, which brought support for the GeForce RTX 5060 Ti, appears to deliver unexpected performance gains for several "Blackwell" GeForce RTX 50 series GPUS in UL's 3DMark Steel Nomad benchmark. ComputerBase community users with RTX 5070, 5070 Ti, and 5080 GPUs reported three to eight percent score uplifts after upgrading, prompting ComputerBase to verify these claims under controlled conditions. Their independent testing confirms that the RTX 5080 jumps from 8,094 to 8,550 points (a 5.6 percent boost), the RTX 5070 Ti climbs from 6,463 to 6,932 points (7.3 percent), and the RTX 5070 improves from 4,838 to 5,242 points (8.4 percent).

By contrast, the flagship RTX 5090 sees only a marginal lift from 14,032 to 14,117 points, which is well within standard test variance, while the RTX 5060 Ti remains essentially unchanged at roughly 3,530 points, likely because it launched with an up-to-date driver. When evaluating other popular UL benchmarks, namely Speed Way and Time Spy, ComputerBase observed no measurable uplift from driver version 576.02. In fact, some Time Spy runs dipped slightly, underlining that the anomaly appears confined to Steel Nomad's specific workload. It's important to note that synthetic benchmarks do not always translate directly to in-game performance. Historical data from ComputerBase's GPU suite suggests Blackwell cards sometimes outperform their synthetic gains in actual titles, but results vary by engine and title. Besides RTX 5060 Ti support and a strange performance increase, the 576.02 WHQL fixes a host of game‑specific crashes, stutters, aliasing, and stability issues across titles like Fortnite, Overwatch 2, Hellblade II, Control, and more.



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[ixi]

Did they "enable" back missing engines?

 

[Shihab]

Did they "enable" back missing engines?

No. They enabled the Volvo mode.

 

[remekra]

My 5080 still gets lower scores on Port Royal and Speedway than on older drivers (second from 572 branch I think it was). But not sure how stock scores look as I OC'ed it. But during Speedway clocks fluctuate a lot going from 3200 to 3000 and back. I was getting over 10k now it's 9600.

 

[mb194dc]

My 5080 still gets lower scores on Port Royal and Speedway than on older drivers (second from 572 branch I think it was). But not sure how stock scores look as I OC'ed it. But during Speedway clocks fluctuate a lot going from 3200 to 3000 and back. I was getting over 10k now it's 9600.

There's another thread from yesterday also suggesting the new drivers cripple performance, not improve it...

Possibly they've tweaked the voltage boost curve and whilst it's helping some chips it's hurting others.

 

[Legacy-ZA]

I see the performance bump in Steel Nomad, but not Speedway, I also don't see it in-game, in fact, slightly worse in-game which is not surprising as the Voltage doesn't go to 1.070V anymore, rather, stay around 1.04-5.

 

[Deleted member 187435]

From reading on reddit a lot of 40 series owners are still getting black screens and other issues (like stuttering while vsync is on) with the new drivers. So I'm staying on 566.36 for now.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Benchmarks have awesome gameplay.

 

[Ruru]

From reading on reddit a lot of 40 series owners are still getting black screens and other issues (like stuttering while vsync is on) with the new drivers. So I'm staying on 566.36 for now.

Same. I've heard so much negative feedback from newer drivers, that I'll rather stay with older yet working ones.

 

[Broken Processor]

Only another 22% to get it where it should be. Come on Nvidia you can do it.

 

[tommo1982]

Wow, and it was AMD made fun off for poor drivers at release. Never thought I'd see Nvidia too. Does AI write drivers for them?

 

[PixelTech]

From my un-scientific benchmarks of 7DtD, Valheim, Dying Light 2, Ready or Not, Fortnite, The Finals, Hell Divers 2, Overwatch 2, and Valorant plus scientific CS2 benchmark I saw no performance gain for my 5090 FE with the new graphic driver. However Fortnite no longer crashes. However, I still get frozen screens and audio is still playing for about 20 sec to 1 min.

 

[Deleted member 187435]

Wow, and it was AMD made fun off for poor drivers at release. Never thought I'd see Nvidia too. Does AI write drivers for them?

My last AMD card was a Radeon 8500 over 20 years ago (I know it was ATI then). The ongoing nvidia driver shambles will make me return to AMD for my next card if nothing changes. AMD's cards are getting more enticing as well.

 

[Guwapo77]

Benchmarks have awesome gameplay.

Exactly! What in the hell is Nvidia thinking...

I've had some bad experiences with graphics cards in the past, but they got it fixed in a reasonable amount of time. However, I'm at the point where I want to sue Nvidia, this is absurd.

 

[mtosev]

Nice to see that they were able to squeeze more performance from the drivers.

 

[AhmadMZ99]

not sure if RTX 30 series is effected with pre-last update but i am still using 572.60

 

[Legacy-ZA]

This is probably as a result of ripping out 32-bit support while trying to make everything work with newer/older GPUs with a all-in-one driver package, at least part of it.

Nice to see that they were able to squeeze more performance from the drivers.

Yeah, I can see how Steel Nomad will increase my game performance.

But yes, there is performance left on the table, there are instances where a 4070Ti Super is slightly faster than the 5070Ti, though the xx50 has more hardware count, higher clocks etc.

 

[loracle706]

Bullshit, it's a fake news from techpowerup to help Ngreedia by trying making people forgets about 5 months of faulty drivers, and synthetic bench does not mean anything you can have different scores every time you make a test and sometimes the differences are huge, so better keep quite !!

 

[katzi]

Good to see nvidia is focusing on the Important things /s

what a fucking shitshow.

 

[watzupken]

I am sticking with the 566.36 version for now since the RTX 4070 mobile will not benefit from the new driver. It is not worth the small gains while increasing the risk of instability substantially.

 

[TheDeeGee]

Exactly! What in the hell is Nvidia thinking...

I've had some bad experiences with graphics cards in the past, but they got it fixed in a reasonable amount of time. However, I'm at the point where I want to sue Nvidia, this is absurd.

You know what's funny?

Fortnite upon launch is telling me that 566.36 is known to have stability issues... excuse me?

 

[Rjc31]

I've had zero issues with any of these drivers on my 4090... I know that I'm going to go home from work today and it's going to happen now but I haven't had an issue yet. And no I'm not an Nvidia fanboy.

 

[mate123]

Interesting when AMD did this regularly it was celebrated and portrayed as something desireable (fine wine)...

 

[mahanddeem]

Latest driver has a weird issue in monitoring GPU temp on my Asus TUF 4090 OC. Sometimes it gets stuck on 30c and negatively affecting fan curve.

 

[phints]

Between this 576 driver and Windows update 24H2 last year my 4 year old Ryzen build, along with 2 year old GPU is up 8-10% in benchmarks. This is pretty unheard of so nice to see.