NVIDIA Restored Six-Month-Old Performance for Some Lucky Users in Driver 595.76
The 595-series drama kept getting weirder. Version 595.59 knocked out fan control; then 595.71 — "bricked" is the word many used — seemed to hamstring OC on a lot of cards. A surprising voltage cap (around 0.9 V) popped up on affected systems, so boost clocks sagged and real-world FPS in demanding titles took a hit.
A hotfix (595.76) has helped some people — not everyone — and a handful of users claim their rigs are back to, or even a hair above, the performance from the summer 2025 drivers. The best reports mention up to ~7% uplift versus pre-595 drivers. One Reddit post shows an RTX 5080 hitting 9972 points in 3DMark Steel Nomad; the same GPU, same OC and system settings, had been stuck near 9223 before.
Not all is solved. Plenty of users now say 595.76 breaks Vulkan titles — DX11 (DirectX 11, or DX11 if you prefer the shorthand) can be a temporary fallback, but that disables frame generation in some games (Arknights: Endfield, for example). Others report being unable to get any usable experience in Doom: The Dark Ages when running Vulkan. So you might get your old 3DMark numbers back, or you might trade one problem for another.