Nvidia’s latest driver gives your GPU a performance boost, but there’s a catch

By Monica J. White Published April 18, 2025

If you own one of Nvidia’s best graphics cards, the latest driver update might be an interesting one for you. According to users who downloaded the patch, the drivers bring an up to 8% boost in synthetic benchmarks. But, seeing as most of us don’t spend all of our time benchmarking our GPUs, what are the actual benefits of the 572.02 graphics driver?

The first reports of these driver improvements showed up on Reddit and were then picked up by publications like VideoCardz. Some users have found that they saw performance gains in synthetic benchmarks, ranging from 3% to 8%.

This isn’t something that happens often. Nvidia’s aim with this driver was to resolve a number of issues, including black screens, crashes, and overall stability problems. Performance gains weren’t mentioned as part of the update changelog.

Users are seeing various other benefits. Some claim to be seeing a slight improvement in frames per second (fps), and others note that the idle power consumption was reduced following the driver update. However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows in those Reddit comments, because some users have also found that their GPUs aren’t doing quite as well as before.

One user who owns an MSI Shadow OC RTX 5080 GPU says that their card’s overclocking capabilities got worse after the patch. From a stable overclock of +400/+1,250, their GPU can now only hold +300/+800. Meanwhile, another user says that the latest driver caused “a ton of stuttering, frame loss, [and] weird clock behavior.”

It’s possible for all those stories to be true. Nvidia’s RTX cards might now fare better in benchmarks, but this doesn’t mean much in terms of gaming gains, and it’s hard to say what caused the crashes reported by a couple of users. We’ll be monitoring the situation and will keep you posted if there are any issues with the driver.