PSA: nVidia's 526.98 Drivers are BAD for X4

[Scoob]

Hey all,

I updated to nVidia's 526.98 drivers for my 3070 a couple of days ago and all seemed well. I've played multiple titles just fine. However, X4 is basically broken with these drivers.

I was initially worried my 3070 was dying as I got screen artefacting on the initial menu, then a blank screen - other than the voice-over subtitles - when starting a fresh, vanilla game. I confirmed other titles ran just fine, and even stress-tested the card without issue. However, X4 continued to artefact and crash.

I rolled back to the older 517.48 driver and all is well once more. Looking online, it looks like 526.98 drivers are a MESS and 3060ti owners are having a particularly bad time of it.

So, thought I'd share in case others have started having such issues, but didn't associate it with these drivers.

[exogenesis]

I've been playing X4 with
526.98-desktop-win10-win11-64bit-international-dch-whql.exe
'Game Ready Driver' (as they put it)
https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx
on Windows 11 for about a week without problems on a GF RTX 3090.

Maybe it's specifically giving probs with 3070/60 &/or Windows 10 ?

Most of my graphic setting are 'on' & high/ultra, MSAAx4, 2560x1440, fullscreen.

[jlehtone]

I have same version as exogenesis, Windows 10, and 3070. I've had couple X4 sessions with that combo, but did not observe any artefacts.

[Alan Phipps]

No issues at all for 11 days now with Win 10 x64 fully updated and that driver with an RTX 3070 playing lots of X4. Also see this thread which probably shows that such issues can be very system/settings dependent since that was an issue with an earlier driver - and it was fixed by updating to the one now giving the OP troubles!

[shovelmonkey]

No problems with the latest Win 11 and RTX 4090.

[Scoob]

With my system:

3900X
RTX 3070
32GB DDR4 3600
2x M.2 NVMe in RAID0
Windows 10 22H2

These drivers are a mess, graphical corruption and often entirely blank screen, though X4 was the only game affected. Perhaps it was the only Vulkan one?

This is the exact driver I downloaded: "526.98-desktop-win10-win11-64bit-international-dch-whql.exe"

Glad others don't have issues, but this driver was a nightmare for me in X4. It's so very rare I have issues with NV Drivers, this surprised me.

Rolling-back, or rather just installing over, 517.48 - the drivers I was using before - and all is well. Not tried any of the driver releases in between these two.

I'd been on these newest drivers for a few days IIRC - just not playing X4 - I guess something could have just become corrupted in them, rather than the driver being bad. My first action was to reinstall the older drivers, I did not try re-installing the new ones.

[Gavrushka]

I've one of the first RTX3070 cards, and am using the same driver, Scoob, and I have no issues at all.

Makes it hard to get to the bottom of the issue when it is so machine dependent, as Alan stated.

Hope you can find another solution that doesn't involve a rollback.

[Alan Phipps]

@ Scoob: Just try a clean reinstall of that driver and see. It could have been an installation, update or corruption issue in the Vulkan components of that driver suite and so may well not have had any effects with far more common DirectX-based games.

[Pesanur]

@Scoob
If you are using the steam version of the game, try disabling the shader caching in the Steam settings. If the cache if corrupted, can cause the problems that you are having. Just because this, I have it always disabled.

[Gavrushka]

New driver just dropped. Hopefully it addresses @Scoob's issues.