NVIDIA Probes Windows 11 KB5074109 Issues: Black Screens, Artifacts, FPS Drops

ChatGPT · Feb 3, 2026

Nvidia has confirmed it is actively investigating a string of visual glitches, black-screen incidents and frame‑rate regressions that many GeForce users began seeing after Microsoft’s Windows 11 January cumulative (KB5074109), and an Nvidia staffer even advised affected users that removing the January rollup currently appears to resolve some of the most visible in‑game artifacts.

Background

Microsoft shipped the January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 (KB5074109), which raised affected systems to OS builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623 and bundled more than 100 security and quality fixes alongside a servicing stack update (SSU). That mix of security, platform and servicing changes is why administrators tsequential, but it also makes it a larger surface for unintended driver interactions.
Shortly after the update began to reach broad audiences, independent testers and end users reported a pattern of symptoms concentrated in two areas: enterprise/cloud regressions (notably AVD/Cloud PC sign‑in failures) andproblems such as short black screens, persistent wallpaper resets, visible artifacts in motion, and measurable FPS drops in demanding scenes. The gamer reports have clustered around Nvidia GeForce systems in particular, though not exclusively.
Microsoft has been shipping follow‑up and preview updates intended to address some black‑screen and multi‑user issues, most notably a Release Preview build that includes a graphics fix described as addressing black screens in isolated multi‑user environments. That change apific upgrade scenarios; it is not framed as a comprehensive cure for the full set of game artifacts and performance regressions being reported.

What users are seeing right now

Short freezes during gameplay that recover without a full crash, sometimes leaving the desktop with a plain black wallpaper until personalization is reapplied.
Discrete visual corruption in motion: rectangular artifacts, abnormal shadowing or banding in certain scenes (Forza Horizon 5 and other modern titles have been singled out in community posts).
Measurable drops in average FPS and worse 1%/0.1% lows — community benches and independent testbeds report directional losses often in the range of roughly 10–30% in affected scenarios. These symptoms increase perceived stutter and harm competitive gameplay.
Driver crashes and black screens tied to the nvlddmkm stack/driver, sometimes recoverable and sometimes causing reboots. Community threads around the latest GeForce Game Ready driver series (591.xx) have also reported y that may or may not be directly linked to the Windows rollup.

Multiple communities — Reddit, the Nvidia Driver Feedback forum, enthusiast sites and Windows‑focused newsrooms — have dozens of anecdotal threads where players report that uninstalling KB5074109 restored their previous performance and removed artifacts. Those user-level reproductions are a strong signal that the update interacts with graphics drivers and workload patterns in nontrivial ways, but they remain heterogeneous: not every machine or title is affected.

How NVIDIA responded

Nvidia’s official release cadence confirms the GeForce Game Ready Driver 591.86 (WHQL) shipped on January 27, 2026, but the company has also been monitoring forum reportcrashes and glitching tied to the 591.xx branch and to interactions with recent Windows updates. The 591.86 release itself is documented on Nvidia’s driver listing and was intended to add game support and DLSS updates, but post‑release community feedback quickly flagged regressions on some systems.
On the Nvidia official forums, an Nvidia representative (identified as Manuel in captured community posts) acknowledged the reports and said engineering was “looking into” specific artifact reports — and in at least one response recommended uninstalling KB5074109 as a temporary way to resolve certain visual anomalies. That reply is notable not because Nvidia is conceding blame but because it shows real‑time triage: when interactions are observed between an OS rollup and GPU driver behavior, the fastest immediate mitigation for consumers can sometimes be to revert the OS change while vendors pursue a more durable fix.
Nvidia’s postu pattern: when a Microsoft cumulative update alters low‑level behavior that some drivers relied upon or were tested against, the GPU vendor may choose to 1) investigate and reproduce the issue internally, 2) ship a narrowly scoped hotfix driver if possible, or 3) advise temporary rollbacks or workarounds while a coordinated fix is created. That sequence played out last October with KB5066835 and Nvidia’s subsequent hotfix 581.94; the pattern is repeating here.

Why an OS update can suddenly break games

Mo on a tight choreography between the OS, the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), GPU drivers, firmware, anti‑cheat drivers, overlays, and the game engines themselves. Small changes in scheduling, interrupt behavior, presentation semantics (how frames are presented and composed), or power‑management heuristics can alter timing in a way that manifests only under certain loads. When that happens, you can see:

Frame submission and present timing shifts that reduce effective GPU utilization.
Increased driver or DWM overhead that introduces micro‑stutters.
Unexpected interactions with anti‑cheat or overlay hooks that add latency or stall render threads.
Broken assumptions in driver code paths exposed only by newer builds of Windows or by a change in the servicing stack.

Because KB5074109 bundled a Servicing Stack Update with the cumulative could leave persistent state that’s harder to fully revert than a normal LCU-only patch. That partially explains why some users report clean rollbacks bring back prior behavior while others still see quirks until additional fixes are applied. The practical upshot: reproducing these bugs requires reprodue stack, installed updates and system configuration — which is why vendor triage often takes time.

Precedent: the October KB5066835 incident

This is not the first time a Windows cumulative has correlated with gaming regressions. The Octoulative produced a similar pattern: large, scene‑specific FPS drops and frame‑pacing regressions on some GeForce systems. Nvidia responded with a targeted hotfix (GeForce Hotfix Display Driver 581.94) that proved helpful for many affected users. Independent testing by outlets such as Digital Foundry and coverage in mainstream tech press documented extreme cases — for example, severe drops in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows benchmarks on otherwise extremely capable hardware. That episode shows how an expose timing/resource interactions that are difficult to detect in vendor QA unless the exact combination of workload and platform is exercised.
The October incident also established choices for vendors and users: ship a foc narrower QA), advise rollbacks or workarounds, and later fold the mitigation into a fully validated WHQL driver after broader testing. Nvidia appears to be following that same operational playbook now.

Verified technical facts and numbers

KB5074109 release date and OS builds: Microsoft published the January cumulative on January 13, 2026, advancing affected Windows 11 releases to builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623.
Nvidia GeForce Game Ready Driver 591.86 (WHQL) release date: Nvidia’s driver listing shows 591.86 was released on January 27, 2026.
Community‑reported directional FPS impacts: user and lab reports coalesce around average drops commonly reported between roughly 10–30% in affected scenes, with extreme outliers seen in specific titles during previous servicing incidents. Those figures are community and lab observations and not guaranteed outcomes for every configuration.

Where reports are anecdotal (for examn a single map or the single‑user claim that uninstalling KB5074109 returned performance to exactly prior levels), treat those as user observations that need independent reproduction in a controlled testbed before generalizing. The vendors have not yetine forensic of root cause code paths; until they do, causal language should be cautious.

Practical advice for gamers and IT managers

If you’re a gamer or manage machines used for gaming or content creation, here’s a pragmatic to triage and mitigate impact while balancing security and stability.

Reproduce and measure first.
Record baseline performance metrics (average FPS, 1% lows, frametime graphs) before changing Windows or driver state. This ensures any remediation can be validated objectively.
Try a clean driver reiny Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode to fully remove driver remnants, then install a known stable driver (for example, the previous 591.xx or a 581.xx hotfix baseline) and retest. Clean reinstalls often solve corruption introduced by version skew.
If problems persist and you are convinced the Windows January update is the trigger, consider rolling back KB5074109 as a temporary mitigation — but weigh the security trade‑off.
Microsontains more than 100 security fixes; uninstalling it reduces your patch coverage. Use rollback only if you have a strong business or gameplay reason and ideally on non‑production machines or after isolating the user from risky networks.
For fleets and enterpr Use Microsoft’s Known Issue Rollback (KIR) and targeted out‑of‑band patches rather than wholesale uninstall when possible. Stage updates, apply pilot groups, and coordinate with Nvidia support as needed.
Collect diagnostics for vendor triage.
If you file a bug with Nvidia or Microsoft, include the Windows build number, driver version, GPU model, DxDiag, crash dumps, and clear reproduction steps. This speeds root‑cause analysis.
Watch vendor channels for hotfixes.
Nvidia historically issues narrow hotfix drivers that address specific OS-interaction regressions quickly; these are pragmatic mitigations that are later folded into fully validated WHQL drivers. If you prefer stability over rapid fixes, wait for WHQL consolidation.

Weighing the trade‑offs: security vs. usability

Uninstalling a cumulative security rollup should never be trivialized — KB5074109 carries vulnerability fixes and a fix for NPU idle power behavior that matters for battery life on AI‑capable laptops. Removing a security update to recover gaming performance buys immediate usability but increases exposure to vulnerabilities the patch fixed. That tension is the central operational dilemma here. Administrators and power users must make a conscious risk decision rather than reflexively ublogs.windows.com)
For production environments, the safer path is to use Known Issue Rollbacks, alternate connection paths for cloud PCs, or temporary targeted mitigations while vendors produce valihome gamer on a locked‑down network, a temporary rollback plus prompt reapplication once a vendor fix is released may be reasonable — but document the change, back up the system and minimize exposure while the system is in an unpatched state.

Critical analysis: what this episode exposes about ecosystem coordination

This wave of reports underscores persistent fragility in the OS‑to‑driver boundary. Microsoft must ship regular cumulative updates for securGPU vendors must rapidly validate drivers against those updates — but the ecosystem remains distributed: thousands of hardware/firmware permutations, third‑party overlays, and anti‑cheat hooks create a verification matrix that is functionally infinite.
Strengths in the current approach:

Vendors and the community now triage issues rapidly; public forums and telemetry accelerate problem discovery and provisional mitigation (hotfix drivers, out‑of‑band updates). Nvidia’s forum engagement and Microsoft’s Release Presses some black‑screen cases show responsiveness.

Risks and weaknesses:

The incumbent model relies heavily on post‑deployment mitigation rather than exhaustive pre‑deployment coverage. Hotfix drivers and rollbacks are pragmatic but increase churn and user confusion.
Rapid mitigations (hotfixes) have narrower QA windows and can introduce secoThe October 2025 incident and subsequent hotfix demonstrated both the speed and the risk of this pattern.
Communication remains fragmented. Users are left to parse forum threads, release notes and insider build announcements to understand whether a fix exists and whether it addresses their specific symptom set. Clearer, coordinated advisories from Microsofme developers would reduce the time users spend guessing which component to blame.

Longer‑term fixes should prioritize:

Improved joint regression testing for major servicing waves, with vendor‑provided test cases for modern game engines and anti‑cheat/overlay stacks.
Better telemetry sharing between OS vendors, hardware vendors and major game publishers that preserves privacy while enabling faster root‑cause identification.
Clear escalation/rollback playbooks for enterprise customers that reduce the need for dangerous ad‑hoc uninstalls.

Bottom line and expectations

Nvidia is investigating and has acknowledged user reports; in at least one community reply an Nvidia representative advised uninstalling KB5074109 as an effective temporary mitigation for certain artifact cases. If you are experiencing severe visual corruption or stability problems after January’s cumulative, rolling back the KB has in many community reports restored prior behavior — but that is a trade‑off against security patches the rollup included.
Microsoft’s Release Preview build and follow‑on emergency patches target some black‑screen conditions, but the preview notes do not claim to resolve all in‑game artifact or performance issues. Expect additional targeted patches from Microsoft and either a narrow Nvidia hotfix or an updated WHQL Game Ready driver that integrates any mitigation.
For gamers: measure before you change, prefer a clean DDU reinstall and test a stable driver first, and only roll back the Windows patch if the impact justifies the security trade‑off. For IT managers: use KIRs, stage updates, and coordinate with vendor support rather than recommending blanket uninstalls.

This is an ongoing investigation with live vendor triage and rapidly evolving mitigations. Expect Nvidia and Microsoft to publish more specific guidance and potentially hotfix drivers in the coming days; monitor official channels, collect clear diagnostics if you’re affected, and avoid knee‑jerk system changes without backups and documented rollback paths.

Source: PC Guide Nvidia confirms it is looking into several game graphics issues following the Windows 11 January update

ChatGPT · Feb 4, 2026

NVIDIA has opened an investigation after a wave of reports tied to Microsoft’s January 2026 Windows 11 update (KB5074109) described black screens, screen flicker, visual corruption and measurable frame‑rate losses on GeForce GPUs, and early community troubleshooting suggests uninstalling the patch or applying Microsoft’s optional January preview (KB5074105) can resolve at least some symptoms.

Background

The problem trace begins with Microsoft’s January cumulative security update for Windows 11, published as KB5074109 (builds 26200.7623 and 26100.7623). That update was intended as a monthly security rollup but quickly became associated with a broad class of reliability issues across multiple subsystems — not just graphics — including taskbar/Explorer instability, device driver removals for legacy modem drivers, and intermittent black screens at boot or during use. Multiple community threads, news outlets and support pages collected anecdotal and troubleshooting reports within days of deployment.
NVIDIA’s engagement began after gamers and enthusiasts posted complaints to the Feedback Hub, GeForce forums and social channels describing game‑time visual artifacts and performance degradation. An NVIDIA community moderator (identified as Manuel) responded publicly that the company was looking into the reports and noted that removing KB5074109 appeared to mitigate the issues for some users. NVIDIA also confirmed the black‑screen symptom appears addressed by the later preview patch KB5074105, although not every reported glitch is fixed by that optional update.

What users are seeing: symptoms and scope

Visual corruption and flicker

Reports describe brief to sustained visual corruption when rendering motion in games — rectangular artifacts, banding, abnormal shadows and other anomalous pixels that don’t originate from the game itself. Titles singled out in forum threads include modern, GPU‑intensive games where dynamic lighting and large draw distances stress the graphics pipeline. These artifacts can be transient (recoverable without a crash) or severe enough to require a driver reset or system reboot. Community logs suggest the corruption appears in both fullscreen exclusive and borderless modes.

Black screens at boot or during use

A reported black screen condition manifests in two main ways: (1) a stall during boot where the system shows only a blank display for several seconds to minutes before the desktop appears, and (2) short black‑out flashes during normal operation or when returning from game sessions. Microsoft’s later optional preview documented fixes specifically targeting isolated multi‑user environments and black screen issues, which aligns with user claims that KB5074105 can cure some black screen scenarios.

FPS drops and stutter

Multiple users recorded frame‑rate declines after installing the January update — anecdotal figures cluster around 10–20 FPS drops in affected scenarios, and worse 1%/0.1% lows that increase perceived stutter. Benchmarks and community test logs differ by system, GPU model and driver versions, so the precise magnitude varies, but the directional consensus is a measurable hit to sustained gaming performance on some machines. These degradations appear correlated with the OS update in community reproductions where uninstalling KB5074109 restores prior performance. This figure should be treated as a community average rather than a universal measure.

Heterogeneous impact

Not every system or game is affected. The issue set is heterogeneous — some users see nothing, others see just a single symptom (e.g., only Explorer instability), while a smaller subset experiences the full suite (artifacts + black screen + FPS loss). That pattern suggests the problem is not a single binary failure but an interaction across Windows components, drivers, and specific hardware or software configurations.

What NVIDIA and Microsoft have said (and not said)

NVIDIA’s public posture is investigative: the company acknowledged reports on its forums and indicated its engineering teams are looking into the problem even though the root cause appears tied to a Windows update rather than a pure GeForce driver regression. NVIDIA staff explicitly advised that, in multiple community threads, uninstalling KB5074109 seems to resolve many of the observed artifacts. That response is deliberately cautious — NVIDIA cannot (and did not) assert definitive root‑cause without further telemetry and lab verification.
Microsoft has acknowledged a range of issues stemming from the same January security rollup and issued an optional preview update, KB5074105, later in the month. Microsoft’s support documentation for the preview lists specific fixes and mitigation paths and recommends Known Issue Rollback (KIR) methods and Group Policy options for enterprise administrators to manage the rollback where appropriate. Microsoft framed KB5074109 as a security update with nontrivial scope and warned that some changes were intentional (for instance, removal of legacy modem drivers for security reasons).

Technical analysis: plausible causes and mechanisms

Understanding why a cumulative security update would trigger GPU artifacts or performance regressions requires looking at the Windows graphics stack holistically. The modern Windows graphics pipeline includes:

The Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), which mediates GPU driver interactions with the OS.
DirectX (including DDI/dxgi interactions), responsible for presenting frames.
Kernel and user‑mode components that affect timing, power management and CPU/GPU synchronization.
Drivers and firmware (GPU driver, motherboard chipset, BIOS/UEFI, and GPU VBIOS).
Third‑party overlays, capture software and any system‑level hooks.

When a cumulative OS update touches kernel interfaces, GDI/Direct Composition, or power management semantics, it can shift timing and scheduling in ways that expose latent race conditions in GPU drivers or game engines. Likewise, if the update modifies device enumeration or driver callbacks, it can lead to intermittent driver resets that manifest as black screens or brief visual corruption. The heterogeneity of reports — from minor stutter to heavy artifacting — points to timing and state management interactions more than to a single broken shader or fixed function bug.
A few specific technical vectors worth calling out:

Driver‑OS interface changes: Small changes in WDDM behavior or kernel callback timings can change how the driver queues and retires GPU work, creating visible artifacts in the display pipeline.
Power and thermal management shifts: Updates that touch power policy or CPU scheduling can alter how quickly the system recovers resources for the GPU, producing stutter or lower sustained clocks.
Resource cleanup and rollback behavior: If the update introduced or reverted a component that influences process isolation, it could affect multi‑user session behavior that the preview KB5074105 later attempted to address.
Telemetry and reproducibility limits: Without broad telemetry or standardized community repros, vendor engineers must triage using patterns and casework rather than a single deterministic test.

How to verify and collect evidence (for advanced users and IT teams)

If you’re affected and want to gather reproducible evidence for vendors or your IT desk, collect the following artifacts before changing system state, and again after any remediation you test:

Windows Event Viewer logs (System and Application), especially for driver crashes referencing nvlddmkm or Tdr (Timeout Detection and Recovery).
Reliability Monitor snapshots around the symptom window.
dxdiag output and DirectX diagnostic logs.
GPU driver version and Windows build (Settings > System > About); note the OS build number associated with KB5074109 (e.g., build 26200.7623).
Frame rate logs: recorded benchmark runs using tools like CapFrameX, OCAT or presentmon to show 1% and 0.1% lows, and average FPS pre/post.
If possible, a short video capture demonstrating artifacts (use a second camera if overlay capture fails during driver resets).
Capture of installed updates (View installed updates or DISM /get-packages) so you can show KB5074109 presence or absence.

For enterprise environments, collect device telemetry and coordinate Known Issue Rollback policies via Group Policy as Microsoft recommended in its KB documentation. Microsoft’s support entry for the preview provides Group Policy instructions for KIR deployment.

Short‑term mitigation and remediation options

If you are experiencing symptoms, there are practical steps you can take. These actions balance immediate relief against potential security and stability tradeoffs.

Uninstall KB5074109: Community reports and vendor observations indicate uninstalling the January update often restores previous behavior. This is effective but removes security fixes contained in that rollup; weigh the risk profile for your environment. Tools: Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates, or use WinRE if the desktop is inaccessible. Windows Central published step‑by‑step uninstallation instructions tailored to this scenario.
Apply KB5074105 (preview): Microsoft’s optional preview update addressed specific black‑screen issues in isolated environments and appears to resolve at least the boot black‑screen symptom for some users. Preview updates are optional and are not guaranteed to be the final fix; Microsoft’s guidance classifies them as preview/optional and therefore appropriate for testing rather than broad deployment. Tech outlets emphasize the preview nature and potential residual risk.
Use Known Issue Rollback (KIR) or Group Policy (enterprises): Microsoft documented a Group Policy‑based mitigation path to deploy a KIR for affected enterprise devices. This allows IT to selectively disable the specific change causing issues while retaining the broader security posture. Enterprises should follow Microsoft’s instructions and test in a controlled environment.
Reinstall GPU drivers cleanly: Run a Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode to remove existing GeForce drivers completely, then reinstall the latest NVIDIA drivers (Game Ready or Studio as appropriate). Some users found that driver reinstallation combined with rolling back KB5074109 or applying KB5074105 improved reliability. Note: use DDU only if you are comfortable with Safe Mode and driver reinstallation procedures.
Pause updates: If you revert to a stable state, pause Windows Updates for several weeks until a Microsoft cumulative patch explicitly addresses the issue. This prevents the problematic rollup from reapplying automatically. Microsoft and media outlets recommended pausing updates as a stopgap for affected devices.

Guidance for gamers and enthusiasts: immediate checklist

Check Windows Build and installed updates to confirm whether KB5074109 is present.
If you experience black screens at boot or startup, consider applying KB5074105 (preview) as a first test while acknowledging preview update risk. Back up data first.
If in‑game corruption or FPS loss persists, try a clean DDU uninstall of NVIDIA drivers and reinstall the latest stable driver. Record benchmarks pre/post to validate change.
For severe boot failures, use WinRE to remove the update or restore a system image; follow official guidance if desktop is inaccessible. Windows Central and other outlets provided user‑friendly steps for such cases.

Risks and tradeoffs

Uninstalling a cumulative security rollup removes important vulnerability patches. KB5074109 fixed many security holes; reverting it to recover gaming stability increases exposure to those vulnerabilities. Organizations and security‑conscious users should weigh this tradeoff carefully.
Preview updates carry their own risk. KB5074105 is a preview (optional) release designed to address specific regression scenarios. Installing preview updates on systems that must remain 100% stable (production workstations, streaming setups during scheduled events) is not recommended. Tech media explicitly caution that preview packages can introduce unexpected side effects.
Partial fixes and inconsistent repros make it harder for vendors to provide rapid universal remedies. The heterogeneity of the issue increases time to a comprehensive fix and forces reliance on casework and targeted rollbacks (KIR) rather than a single driver patch.
DIY troubleshooting has risk: using tools like DDU, editing Group Policy, or uninstalling updates from WinRE can lead to missteps. Always back up user data and document changes before proceeding.

Why this matters: system integrity and vendor coordination

Security updates and reliability fixes must coexist. The January incident is a reminder that a single monthly rollup touching kernel or display interfaces can ripple outward to affect third‑party drivers and complex user workloads such as gaming. For NVIDIA, investigating Windows‑triggered regressions is essential because even when the immediate fault lies with an OS change, GPU vendors must ensure their drivers gracefully handle OS transitions and maintain compatibility.
For Microsoft, the incident highlights the complexity of large, global cumulative updates that must account for billions of unique device configurations. The KIR mechanism and Group Policy mitigation are useful enterprise tools, but the consumer experience — black screens, lost functionality, interrupted games — erodes confidence when a single patch introduces a cascade of stability issues. The December–January update cycle demonstrates why staged rollouts, robust telemetry, and tighter vendor co‑testing are operationally critical.

What to watch next

NVIDIA driver updates: NVIDIA engineers will likely push new driver builds that either harden against the OS change or include workarounds that neutralize the interaction. Watch GeForce driver release notes for any mentions of Windows 11 January update compatibility.
Microsoft cumulative updates: expect a follow‑up cumulative or out‑of‑band patch that either replaces KB5074109 entirely or overlays a KIR to protect affected subsystems. Administrators should monitor Microsoft’s update guidance and patch notes.
Community reproducibility: community benchmarks and bug reports will either converge on a reproducible test case (helpful for vendor triage) or remain distributed across configurations (slowing down resolution). If reproducible cases appear, vendors will be able to prioritize fixes faster.

Recommendations for IT administrators

Delay automatic deployment of KB5074109 (or any new cumulative rollup) in managed environments until vendor coordination and field reports stabilize.
Use Microsoft’s Group Policy/Known Issue Rollback guidance to protect managed endpoints and selectively disable the offending change where needed. Follow Microsoft’s published Group Policy downloads and instructions for your Windows build.
Establish a telemetry and rollback window: if your environment includes GPU‑heavy workloads (VDI, virtualization with GPU passthrough, or developer/designer machines), schedule updates during a maintenance window and have a tested rollback plan (system image or scripted uninstall via WinRE).
Communicate clearly with end users: explain the trade‑offs between security and immediate stability. Provide step‑by‑step remediation scripts and support paths for those who opt to revert the update.

Final analysis: where responsibility and remediation intersect

This incident sits at the intersection of OS quality assurance, driver robustness and the practical realities of a massive installed base. The immediate symptoms — black screens, visual corruption, and FPS drops — are real for affected users and are corroborated by multiple independent reports. NVIDIA’s role in investigating is appropriate and necessary, even if the change originated in Microsoft’s update, because GPU drivers must cope with evolving OS semantics.
At the same time, uninstalling a security rollup is not a long‑term solution. The pragmatic path for most users is to follow vendor guidance: back up, record symptoms, collect diagnostics, and apply Microsoft’s recommended mitigations or KIR for enterprise devices. For gamers who rely on stable, high‑performance systems, consider delaying optional/preview patches on your gaming rig and maintain an up‑to‑date image or restore point before applying monthly cumulative updates.
The technical takeaway is that complex software stacks will sometimes produce emergent failures when core components shift. The operational takeaway is that both Microsoft and hardware vendors will need to accelerate coordination and telemetry sharing so next month’s rollups don’t repeat the same user‑impacting fallout.

NVIDIA and Microsoft are actively engaged: NVIDIA is investigating community reports and Microsoft has published an optional preview that addresses some of the black‑screen issues; affected users should follow the mitigation and evidence‑collection steps above while remaining mindful of the security tradeoffs inherent in uninstalling a cumulative security update.
Conclusion: until vendors publish a definitive cumulative fix, the safest approach is measured — back up, gather diagnostics, apply targeted mitigations (KIR or preview patches) in test environments, and avoid blanket uninstalls on production systems unless absolutely necessary.

Source: TweakTown NVIDIA's investigating FPS drops and visual glitches with its GPUs related to Windows 11 update

ChatGPT · Feb 4, 2026

NVIDIA has opened a formal investigation after a wave of reports tied to Microsoft’s January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 (KB5074109) described sudden black screens, visible graphical artifacts and measurable frame‑rate regressions on a subset of GeForce systems — a problem set that appears to be the result of complex interactions between the OS rollup, GPU drivers, and specific hardware/software configurations.

Background and overview

Microsoft published KB5074109 as the January 2026 cumulative security and quality rollup for Windows 11 (applied to version 24H2 and 25H2), advancing affected machines to OS builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623. The package bundles more than a hundred security fixes, a servicing stack update (SSU), and several non‑security quality improvements — including an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) power behavior change — that intentionally touch kernel and driver interaction surfaces.
Within days of broad deployment, multiple community channels surfaced reports of three overlapping problem classes: (1) transient and persistent black screens during boot or desktop use, (2) graphical corruption and artifacts while running games (rectangular artifacts, banding and abnormal shadowing), and (3) significant frame‑rate drops and worsened 1%/0.1% lows that amplify perceived stutter. The aggregated symptom profile and vendor responses point to an OS ↔ driver interaction rather than a single hardware defect, but the experience remains heterogeneous — many users are unaffected while others see one or more severe symptoms.

What users are seeing: symptoms, scope and reproducibility

Black screens and desktop resets

Two distinct black‑screen behaviors have been widely reported. First, some systems stall during boot or at logon, leaving the display blank for several seconds to minutes before desktop elements finally load. Second, users have seen short black‑out flashes during normal operation — often returning from games or high‑load workloads — and in many of those cases the desktop wallpaper is reset to a plain black background until personalization is reapplied. Microsoft acksubset of boot and multi‑user black‑screen regressions and published mitigations via a preview update.

Visual corruption and flicker in games

Players posted screenshots and videos of rectilinear visual artifacts, odd banding and shadow anomalies — frequently in GPU‑intensive titles such as Forza Horizon 5 — that do not originate from These defects often show up in motion (when the pipeline is under sustained stress) and sometimes force driver resets or require reboots. Community repros suggest artifacts appear in both fullscreen exclusive and borderless windowed modes.

FPS drops, micro‑stutter and worse lowyer reports converge on a directional performance regression for a portion of affected systems. Anecdotal and community testbed numbers cluster around average FPS losses in the range of roughly 10–30% in affected scenes, with pronounced degradations to 1% and 0.1% lows that raise perceived stutter. Because results vary by driver version, GPU model, game engine (particularly modern DX12 engines with heavy draw calls), anti‑cheat and overlay software, the precise magnitude is configuration dependent. Multiple users reported that uninstalling KB5074109 restored prior performance in their setups.

Timeline of vendor responses and mitigations

January 13, 2026 — Microsoft releases KB5074109 (OS builds 26100.7623 / 26200.7623). The update includes an SSU and many security fixes; its breadth raises the potential for driver/OS interaction regressions.
Mid‑January 2026 — Community threads and social feeds begin collecting reproducible reports of black screens, display artifacts and game performance drops; many reports point to NVIDIA GeForce systems.
Late January 2026 — NVIDIA engineers acknowledge they are looking into artifact and black‑screen complaints on the GeForce forums; an NVIDIA community moderator (identified in captured posts as Manuel) advised that uninstalling KB5074109 appeared to resolve some artifact reports while also noting that Microsoft’s optional preview KB5074105 addressed certain blawindowslatest.com)
January 29, 2026 — Microsoft publishes a Release Preview update (KB5074105) that includes a specific graphics/display fix described as addressing black screen issues in isolated multi‑user environments after upgrades. Early testing reduced some black‑screen occurrences but did not claim to resolve all in‑game artifact or FPS problems.
Ongoing — NVIDIA and Microsoft continue coordinated (and independent) triage; community-recommended temporary mitigations include clean GPU driver installs, trying the KB5074105 preview, or — as a last resort and with full awareness of security trade‑offs — uninstalling KB5074109.

Why a cumulative Windows update can break games: the technical mechanics

Large cumulative updates are deceptively risky because they touch multiple layers upon which modern graphics stacks depend:

Servicing Stack Update (SSU) integration: KB5074109 includes an SSU alongside the LCU. SSUs change how the OS sequences and commits updates; bundling them with LCUs means the on‑disk servicing state can change in a way that's harder a simple uninstall. This complicates remediation and rollback paths.
WDDM and scheduling semantics: graphics behavior rests on Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM) semantics, kernel↔user transitions for present/swapchain operations, and timing/synchronization assumptions. Even small changes at the kernel, scheduler, or power‑management layer can alter how drivers and GPUs synchronize frames, exposing timing-sensitive bugs that were previously latent.
Driver test surface and real‑world variability: GPU vendors test drivers against many Windows builds and configurations, but cumulative updates change the field dramatically and reveal workload‑specific interactions — modern DX12 engines, anti‑cheat middleware, overlays, and per‑vendor optimizations can all shift how and when regressions appear.

The result is an interaction problem rather than a single‑line bug: the OS change surfaces edge cases in driver code paths, and the observable symptom depends heavily on the whole stack — game engine, middleware, driver branch and user‑level configuration.

Precedent: why this is not unprecedented — the October 2025 case

This pattern mirrors a similar incident in October 2025 (KB5066835), when a Windows cumulative caused dramatic, scene‑specific FPS collapses for some GeForce users. NVIDIA issued a targeted hotfix (GeForce Hotfix Display Driver 581.94) that restored performance in many affected configurations, then folded the fix into a WHQL Game Ready driver later. The incident illustrates the recurring lifecycle: OS update → community reports → vendor hotfix → integration into full driver — with trade‑offs between speed and QA scope.
That precedent matters because it establishes the likely playbook: expect NVIDIA to attempt a narrowly scoped hotfix driver if they can reproduce the regression consistently, while Microsoft continues to refine the OS side (KIRs, preview updates, and eventual rollups) to remove the triggering behavior. But hotfixes shipped quickly can carry narrower QA windows, and long‑tail interactions can remain for weeks until both vendors issue coordinated fixes and test them against a broader matrix.

What NVIDIA has said — and what it hasn’t

NVIDIA’s public posture is investigative. On its official community channels, NVIDIA community staff acknowledged reports and said their engineering teams were looking into the problem; in at least one captured reply a staffer noted that removing KB5074109 resolved artifacts in some customer reproductions. That statement is a triage observation, not a root‑cause admission — it indicates a practical correlation and a short‑term mitigation that worked in lab reproductions or customer cases.
NVIDIA has not, as of this writing, issued a formal global advisory blaming Microsoft or announcing a hotfix driver that explicitly addresses KB5074109-induced regressions. The company’s next steps typically include deeper lab reproduction, targeted driver hotfixes if feasible, and close coordination with Microsoft when the problem stems from a platform change rather than pure driver regression.

Microsoft’s mitigation options and enterprise controls

Microsoft responded via its standard servicing channels: known issue rollbacks (KIRs), optional Release Preview buildseted out‑of‑band patches for high‑impact enterprise regressions such as Azure Virtual Desktop authentication problems. For administrators, Microsoft also documents Group Policy or KIR paths to disable the offending change without fully uninstallnt on some systems.
However, several practical and operational problems have emerged:

Uninstall failures: some users attempting to uninstall KB5074109 encounter error 0x800f0905, which blocks rollback and points to servicing stack or component store issues; workarounds (System Restore, repair installs) may be needed. That elevates the operational risk of recommending mass uninstalls.
Preview fixes are partial: KB5074105’s release notes explicitly address specific multi‑user black‑screen scenarios, not every artifact or performance regression reported in games. Relying on a preview build introduces a small risk and is not a guaranteed cure for every symptom.
Security trade‑off: uninstalling a cumulative security rollup removes CVE patches; for many users and enterprises this is unacceptable, so mitigations that preserve security posture are preferable where possible.

Practical guidance for gamers and administrators

The paradox facing players and sysadmins is immediate stability versus long‑term security. Below are prioritized, pragmatic steps based on communcommendations and standard servicing practice.

For gamers (prioritized)

Step 1 — Measure and document: before changing anything, capture frame‑time logs, average FPS and 1%/0.1% lows (RivaTuner, OCAT, PresentMon), and taf artifacts. This creates a baseline and helps vendors reproduce the bug.
Step 2 — Update or reinstall GPU drivers cleanly: perform a clean uninstall using DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) in Safe Mode, then install the latest WHQL or GeForce Game Ready driver. Some fixes appear simply from a clean DDU reinstall.
Step 3 — Try Microsoft’s optional preview (KB5074105): if you see black screens specifically tied to multi‑user or boot scenarios, KB5074105 has a targeted fix for certain black‑screen behaviors. Test it in a controlled environment before wide deployment.
Step 4 — Consider rollback only as last resort: uninstalling KB5074109 has restored users, but it removes security updates and may fail (error 0x800f0905). If you must roll back, do so from a known good image or after a full system backup and ensure System Restore points or recovery media are available.
Step 5 — Collect and share diagnostics: if symptoms persist, gather logs (Event Viewer, dmp files, nvlddmkm errors), rost in vendor channels (NVIDIA forums, Feedback Hub) with attached artifacts for triage. Vendors need reproducible steps and data. (windowsforum.com)

For IT administrators and enterprise

Use Known Issue Rollback (KIR) or Group Policy where available to disable the problematic change without removing the entire security bundle. This preserves CVE coverage while addressing the operational fault. Microsoft documented relevant Group Policy options for managed deployments.
Stage patches in pilot rings: the incident underscores the need for conservative flighting of monthly LCUs across pilot → broad deployment rings, especially on productivity or GPU‑intensive fleets.
Avoid blanket uninstall recommendations: uninstalling a security cumulative at scale raises compliance and risk management problems. Prefer controlled mitigations (KIR, driver hotfixes, staged updates).
Coordinate with vendors: open support cases with Microsoft and NVIDIA, collect telemetry and engage vendor support channels. Cross‑vendor telemetry sharing (with proper privacy safeguards) shortens root‑cause analysis time.

Critical analysis: strengths, weaknesses and risk assessment

Strengths in the current response

Rapid detection and vendor engagement: users triaged via feedback forums and telemetry triggered a rapid investigative posture from both NVIDIA and Microsoft — a sign that the ecosystem can respond quickly when public reports cluster. NVIDIA’s forum replies and Microsoft’s preview release show active vendor triage.
Tailored remediations exist: Microsoft’s KIR mechanism and the Release Preview route provide pathways to mitigate specific issues without immediately sacrificing the entire security posture.
Historical precedent and established playbook: vendors have successfully used hotfix drivers in prior incidents (October 2025), which gives engineers an operational template to follow.

Weaknesses and systemic risks

Fragile rollback experience: the presence of SSUs and the observed uninstall error 0x800f0905 make rollback risky and sometimes impossible without restoration or repair, undermining the “rollback is a safety valve” narrative.
Fragmented communications: public-facing guidance is scattered across KB pages, preview release notes and forum posts. Consumers often rely on community aggrthe state of fixes, which increases uncertainty and the chance of misapplied mitigations.
QA trade‑offs fos help restore playability quickly but carry narrower test matrices; a narrowly‑tested hotfix can reintroduce regressions in other scenarios. The community depends on a balance between speed and comprehensiveness.
Security vs availability tensions: recommending uninstallations as a fix forces a painful trade‑off for many users and enterprises: remove security patches to restore functionality, or stay patched and accept degraded performance. This is a lose‑lose position for many teams.

Longer‑term lessons and recommendations for Microsoft, NVIDIA and the ecosystem

Joint regression test harnesses: OS vendors and GPU vendors should broaden collaboration on regression test suites that include modern game workloads, anti‑cheat stacks and overlay scenarios to catch timing‑sensitive regressions earlier.
Improved telemetry sharing (privacy‑first): an anonymized, consented telemetry channel between Microsoft, hardware vendors and game publishers would speed reproducibility and root‑cause analysis without exposing user data.
Safer consumer rollback tooling: Microsoft should consider user‑friendly selective mitigation tooling that can deactivate a narrow behavioral change without removing the entire cumulative. Group Policy and KIRs exist, but the consumer UX needs simplification and safer rollback paths.
Clearer, consolidated communications: coordinated advisories (one place with current mitigation status and reproduction instructions) will help reduce guesswork and the unsafe “uninstall everything” reflex.

These steps would reduce both the frequency and the operational pain of future servicing‑induced regressions.

Final verdict: what to expect next

NVIDIA’s investigation and Microsoft’s preview update are the correct short‑term responses: vendors are triaging now, and targeted mitigations are already rolling out to address the most acute symptoms (black screens in multi‑user environments). For many users, updating or clean‑reinstalling GPU drivers, testing KB5074105 in a controlled environment, or waiting for a focused NVIDIA hotfix are the most prudent first moves. Where immediate relief requires uninstalling KB5074109, proceed only after careful backups, restoration points and risk assessment — and be prepared for potential uninstall failures that require repair‑level interventions.
Longer term, expect a small hotfix driver or an updated Game Ready driver from NVIDIA (if engineering can reproduce and patch driver behavior), and one or more Microsoft rollups that refine the servicing stack and remove the triggering changes. Meanwhile, the incident is yet another reminder that modern OS servicing cycles, while necessary for security, require even more rigorous cross‑vendor testing and clearer mitigation channels so that gamers and enterprises are not forced into a binary choice between security and stability.

Quick checklist: what to do if you’re experiencing problems now

Capture data: record FPS and frametime logs, take video/screenshot evidence and collect Event Viewer and driver crash dumps.
Clean driver path: use DDU to remove existing GPU drivers and install the latest WHQL Game Ready driver.
Test Microsoft’s KB5074105 in Release Preview if you have black‑screen symptoms; pilot it first.
Avoid immediate mass uninstalls; if you must rollback KB5074109, do so from a known image and ensure backups/recovery media are present.
Engage vendors: open support tickets with NVIDIA and Microsoft and post reproducible logs to official forums to help speed triage.

This is an ongoing investigation with active vendor triage; expect additional advisories, targeted hotfix drivers and refined Microsoft updates in the coming days as engineering teams converge on reproducible causes and safer mitigations.

Source: Windows Report https://windowsreport.com/nvidia-re...s-triggered-by-kb5074109-patch-in-windows-11/

ChatGPT · Feb 4, 2026

Windows 11 update prompt on a gaming PC with blue RGB lighting and NVIDIA GeForce RTX.

NVIDIA has told users it’s investigating a wave of graphical glitches, black screens and framerate drops that many gamers say started after Microsoft’s January 2026 cumulative Windows 11 update (KB5074109), and one NVIDIA forum representative even recommended uninstalling that update as a short‑term way to restore normal gaming behavior.

Background: what changed in January’s Windows 11 update

January 13, 2026’s cumulative update for Windows 11 — published as KB5074109 and shipping as OS builds 26200.7623 and 26100.7623 — was delivered as a standard Patch Tuesday security rollup that also included a handful of non‑security fixes carried forward from the prior optional preview. Microsoft’s release notes list multiple improvements and explicitly call out some known issues and mitigations, but the update has also been tied in community reports to a variety of reliability problems across multiple subsystems.
The update’s official documentation confirms that Microsoft removed several legacy modem drivers and included fixes for NPU battery drain, cloud‑storage save hangs and other issues. Microsoft also documented a set of “known issues” and pointed administrators toward Known Issue Rollback (KIR) or dedicated Group Policy mitigations for affected enterprise environments — an acknowledgement that the cumulative nature of Windows servicing can sometimes create regressions for a subset of configurations.

What users reported — symptoms, scope and early signals

Across vendor forums, community hubs and multiple tech newsrooms, players began reporting consistent symptoms after installing KB5074109: sudden visual artifacts (rectangular blocks, abnormal shadows or banding), intermittent black screens, degraded frame rates and worse pronounced 1%‑low frame times in demanding titles. Several posters described large, unexplained drops from high framerate averages down to 20–30 FPS in situations that previously ran smoothly. Not every system was affected; reports indicate the problem is heterogeneous and appears in specific workload/driver/OS combinations.
A recurring community observation was that uninstalling KB5074109 appeared to restore normal behavior for many of the affected systems. That pattern — rollback fixes the problem — is a strong signal that some changes in the OS update surfaced incompatibilities with existing GPU drivers or the display stack on particular hardware/software combinations. NVIDIA staff acknowledged they were investigating these reports after the correlation emerged on GeForce forums and other channels.

NVIDIA’s response: triage, admission and the controversial workaround

NVIDIA’s public involvement has been limited but direct. An NVIDIA community representative (identified as Manuel in forum posts captured by multiple outlets) stated the company was looking into artifact and black‑screen complaints and observed that, in at least some cases, uninstalling KB5074109 returned systems to normal operation. The representative noted that Microsoft’s optional preview update KB5074105 includes a fix for isolated black‑screen issues and that users seeing that particular symptom might benefit from trying the preview.
That comment — recommending removal of a Microsoft security update as a mitigation — is striking because it pushes users to choose between temporary gaming functionality and the security/quality changes bundled in the cumulative update. NVIDIA’s post did not categorically blame Microsoft for all problems; instead, it described a high correlation between the Windows rollup and observed anomalies on some systems and committed to further investigation. Still, the practical advice to uninstall a security LCU is what made headlines and set off a familiar debate about responsibility and coordination between Microsoft and hardware vendors.

How we know this isn’t just one-off noise: independent reporting and evidence

This isn’t an isolated Neowin post or a single Reddit thread. Multiple independent outlets — WindowsLatest, Tom’s Hardware, PCGamesHardware and The Register among others — have reported the same pattern: community complaints, forum confirmations, and vendor engagement. Microsoft’s own KB page for KB5074109 documents the update and shows related known‑issue mitigations; community reproductions demonstrating the rollback effect have appeared repeatedly on the GeForce forums and in user feedback channels. The presence of matching reports across independent forums and reputable newsrooms strengthens the conclusion that a nontrivial subset of users are genuinely affected.

The technical picture — plausible mechanisms and limits of current evidence

Any time a cumulative OS update and a hardware vendor’s driver interact poorly, the root cause can lie in multiple layers: API behavior changes, subtle timing differences, changes to kernel interfaces or system components (audio/display/storage subsystems), or even an unintended side effect of an unrelated change (for example, a fix that alters how the OS enumerates devices or manages low‑level interrupts). Graphics drivers are especially sensitive because they rely on complex OS‑supplied services — WDDM (Windows Display Driver Model), GPU scheduling hooks, compositing engines and the device driver stack — and any change to expectations or ordering in those services can produce artifacting, hangs or performance regressions on some systems.
We need to be explicit about what remains unproven. Community rollbacks and forum posts show correlation; they do not by themselves prove causation or identify the precise codepath at fault. Reproducible bug reports, driver logs, and vendor/Microsoft trace analysis are required to definitively identify whether KB5074109 changed a display API contract, altered a scheduler, exposed a latent bug in a third‑party kernel component, or simply exposed a timing sensitivity in certain driver versions. Multiple avenues of investigation are still open to engineers at NVIDIA and Microsoft.

Previous precedents: this pattern has happened before

This is not the first time a Windows update has produced game‑affecting regressions that required vendor triage and emergency fixes. Notable recent precedents include:

Windows 11 22H2-related reports of stuttering and framerate instability that prompted NVIDIA to investigate and release specific driver guidance.
October 2025’s cumulative changes (notably KB5066835) that were linked to reduced gaming performance and led NVIDIA to ship emergency hotfixes to restore expected behavior on affected systems.

Those earlier incidents illustrate the operational reality: the Windows ecosystem is vast and heterogeneous, and cumulative updates — which are tested broadly but cannot cover every unique hardware/firmware/driver permutation — occasionally surface regressions. When that happens, the common vendor response is triage, targeted hotfix drivers, and coordinated patches with Microsoft.

Why rollback is not a harmless fix — security and stability tradeoffs

While uninstalling KB5074109 appears to have restored correct rendering and framerate for many users, removing a cumulative security update carries real risks:

KB5074109 contains security fixes and other system quality updates; removing it reopens the attack surface those fixes corrected. That’s not an academic concern for end users or enterprise systems.
Microsoft’s documentation warns that rolling back the combined SSU + LCU package requires DISM/Remove‑Package and notes complications with uninstalling the servicing stack itself, so the rollback procedure is nontrivial for casual users and may leave systems in an unsupported or partially patched state.
The January rollup was also linked to other problems for a different subset of users (for example, legacy modem driver removal and, in some chains of events, even boot failures). Those are separate symptoms but they underscore that muscling a system back to pre‑update behavior isn’t always safe or fully restorative without follow‑on fixes.

Put plainly: uninstalling KB5074109 can be a helpful emergency troubleshooting step for a single gamer who fully understands the tradeoffs, but it’s not a recommended general remedy for all users — especially not without appropriate backups and an awareness of the security implications.

Practical, step‑by‑step guidance for affected gamers

If you’re seeing artifacts, black screens or sudden FPS drops after a January 2026 Windows update and you use an NVIDIA GPU, here is a pragmatic, risk‑aware sequence of actions you can take. These steps balance practicality against security tradeoffs and aim to avoid unnecessary exposure.

Confirm your Windows build and recent updates. Check Settings → System → About to confirm your OS build number and whether KB5074109 (or other January KBs) is installed. Knowing the exact build helps communicate clearly with support and forums.
Try driver housekeeping first. Perform a clean driver reinstall: uninstall your current GeForce driver using Device Manager or the GeForce Experience clean install option, or use Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in safe mode to completely remove driver residues, then reinstall the latest WHQL driver. Some regressions are fixed simply by a clean driver cycle. Note that DDU is a third‑party tool and should be used with caution and a current backup.
Test with the optional Microsoft preview that targets black screen fixes. Microsoft’s KB5074105 (a preview released after KB5074109) includes a fix that addresses some black screen scenarios; trying the preview can be a lower‑risk step than uninstalling an LCU because it’s a targeted mitigation. Check Windows Update for the Preview/Release Preview channel or use Windows Update’s Optional Updates area.
If symptoms persist and you have fully vetted the security tradeoffs, consider temporary rollback as a last resort. Microsoft documents how to remove the LCU using DISM/Remove‑Package and warns about SSU interactions — do this only if you understand the process and have full backups. If you’re on a managed device, coordinate with IT.
Monitor vendor channels for hotfix drivers. NVIDIA has a history of issuing narrowly scoped hotfix drivers when urgent regressions occur; if the company reproduces the fault, a targeted driver release is a likely outcome. Watch GeForce forum notices and NVIDIA’s driver downloads for emergency hotfixes.
Preserve telemetry and logs for troubleshooting. If you’ve reproduced the problem, collect driver logs and, if comfortable, upload a minimal, non‑sensitive recording to the NVIDIA forum post or Microsoft’s Feedback Hub. Repro steps and logs accelerate vendor triage.

The vendor coordination problem — why this keeps recurring

Three systemic realities contribute to repeated update‑driven regressions:

Scale and heterogeneity: Windows runs on countless motherboards, firmwares, drivers, and software stacks. Even thorough automated testing can miss narrow timing or configuration conditions.
Coupled development cycles: Microsoft ships cumulative updates on a monthly cadence, while hardware vendors ship drivers on different schedules. When an LCU touches components relied upon by drivers, vendors must respond quickly, sometimes with expedited driver releases or workarounds.
Limited telemetry and deployment variability: Vendors don’t always see the full range of user telemetry or the unique combinations that reproduce an issue; community reports remain crucial to spotting systemic problems early.

Those realities argue for stronger pre‑release testing among major ecosystem partners, clearer coordination channels and an easier way for power users and administrators to opt into safe mitigations that preserve security while addressing regressions.

What NVIDIA and Microsoft should — and probably will — do next

The pragmatic path forward is straightforward and follows well‑worn practice:

NVIDIA will triage and attempt to reproduce the reports on representative hardware, then either issue a narrowly targeted hotfix driver or identify the change in the OS that requires Microsoft to alter the update. NVIDIA hotfixes have precedent and often restore performance faster than waiting for the next major driver drop.
Microsoft will continue to push known‑issue mitigations (KIR, preview patches like KB5074105) and, where necessary, modify the LCU in a follow‑on update. Microsoft’s release notes already show related preview and mitigation KBs appearing in the days after the January rollup.
In parallel, both vendors may collaborate to share debug artifacts and test harnesses to build a definitive, reproducible case that pinpoints the offending codepath and produces a durable fix.

That cooperative model is what resolved prior regressions; the difference now is speed and communication. Vendors that provide clearer, more frequent status updates reduce user anxiety and anecdotal speculation.

Critical analysis — strengths, weaknesses and risks in the current handling

Strengths:

Rapid vendor engagement is visible. NVIDIA publicly acknowledged the reports and engaged in forum threads — that transparency speeds problem discovery and helps prioritize fixes.
Microsoft has mechanisms (KIR, optional preview updates) designed to mitigate regressions quickly without requiring a full LCU rollback for all users. Those mechanisms are intended to protect most users while giving admins tools to limit collateral damage.

Weaknesses / risks:

Advising users to uninstall a security update sets a risky precedent. While practical for an emergency troubleshooting path, it’s a blunt instrument that may leave machines vulnerable to exploits addressed by the update. The community spread of that advice can amplify risky behavior among less tech‑savvy users.
Communication gaps remain. Public comments from vendor representatives often lack the engineering detail required to reassure enterprise admins, who must weigh security compliance against application availability. Better co‑published advisories with step‑by‑step mitigations and explicit risk assessments would help.
The patch‑and‑triage model scales poorly when regressions affect a high number of permutations. Each emergency hotfix consumes scarce engineering resources and can cascade into more regression cycles if not carefully tested across representative configurations.

Final recommendations for gamers, system builders and IT teams

Casual gamers: Don’t panic. Try driver housekeeping (clean install, DDU) and the Microsoft preview fix first. Only consider uninstalling KB5074109 if you are comfortable with the security tradeoffs and have full backups.
Enthusiast/system builders: Reproduce the issue methodically, collect logs and post a clear, concise bug report to the GeForce forums and Microsoft Feedback Hub. Those artefacts accelerate vendor triage and increase the chance your specific repro will be included in a hotfix test matrix.
IT administrators and enterprises: Follow Microsoft guidance on Known Issue Rollback and deploy Group Policy mitigations if your estate shows a trend. Avoid wholesale LCU rollback unless the impact is severe and the security exposure can be tolerated. Coordinate with vendor support partners before doing broad remediation.

NVIDIA’s forum‑level acknowledgement and the apparent correlation with KB5074109 are an important early data point in what looks like a classic OS update‑vs‑driver regression story: actionable for power users but requiring caution because of the security tradeoffs involved. The best path forward for most users is methodical troubleshooting (clean driver installs, trying Microsoft’s preview fix) and patient monitoring of vendor channels for a targeted hotfix — while system administrators should leverage Microsoft’s documented mitigation tools rather than sweeping rollbacks. If you’re affected, collect logs, follow vendor guidance and avoid leaving your machine unprotected for longer than necessary.

Source: Neowin https://www.neowin.net/news/nvidia-blames-recent-windows-11-updates-for-gaming-issues-on-your-pc/

ChatGPT · Feb 4, 2026

Nvidia has acknowledged it is “looking into” a wave of gaming problems that began appearing after Microsoft’s January 2026 Windows 11 cumulative update, KB5074109, with community reports pointing to visual artifacts, short black screens and measurable frame‑rate regressions on a subset of GeForce systems.

Background / Overview

KB5074109 was distributed as the January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 and advanced affected installs to OS builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623. The package combined a large security payload with a Servicing Stack Update (SSU) and several non‑security quality changes, including an NPU (Neural Processing Unit) power‑management tweak. SSU with the Latest Cumulative Update (LCU), the rollout altered low‑level servicing behavior on systems where it completed.
Within days of broad deployment, multiple independent community channels reported three overlapping symptom classes:

brief black screens or wallot or while returning from games,
transient or persistent graphical corruption in motion (rectangular artifacts, banding, abnormal shadows), and
measurable drops in average FPS plus degraded 1%/0.1% lows causing increased micro‑stutter.

These reports are heterogeneous: most systems are unaffected, while a smaller subset of configurations (combinations of GPU model, driver series, game engine characteristics, overlays/anti‑cheat and system firmware) show reproducible failures. Community reproductions and vendor forum posts form the current evidence base rather than a single, consolidated vendor post‑mortem.

What users are seeing (the symptom set)

Black screens and wallpaper resets

Two black‑screen flavours emerged in reports. Some users observed a multi‑second blank display during boot or right after sign‑in; others experienced brief black‑out flashes during operation—often when returning from a game session. In many cases affected systems recovered without a crash, but the desktop wallpaper reset to a plain black background until personalization was reapplied. Microsoft acknowledged boot/upgrade‑related black‑screen regressions in certain enterprise scenarios and published mitigations in a Release Preview patch.

Visual corruption in motion

Players posted screenshots and short videos showing rectangular blocks, odd shadow banding and other pixel anomalies that did not originate from the game engines themselves. Titles called out in threads include modern, GPU‑intensive games such as Forza Horizon 5, where large view distances and dynamic lighting make artifacts easy to spot. These defectsg sustained rendering load and sometimes force a driver reset. Community posts implicate recent GeForce drivers (the 591.xx series and later) in many reproductions, though that correlation is not yet definitive.

Performance regression and micro‑stutter

Multiple users and a handful of independent testbeds reported average FPS drops in the general range of **10–3rios, with worse 1%/0.1% lows—results which noticeably increase perceived stutter. These numbers come from community benches and small lab reproductions; treat them as directional rather than universally representative. In many anecdotal reproductions the act of uninstalling KB5074109 restored prior performance. That rollback pattern is an important signal, but it remains correlative until vendors complete a root‑cause analysis.

Why a cumulative update can surface these problems (technical mechanics)

Understanding why KB5074109 could trigger GPU‑visible regressions requires looking at how cumulative updates interact with the graphics stack.

SSU + LCU compounding: Bundling a Servicing Stack Update with the LCU modifies how Windows installs and sequences future updates. Once an SSU commits, the servicing state on disk and the effective update footprint can change subtly—making rollbacks trickier and exposing driver/OS timing mismatches that were previously latent.
WDDM timing and scheduler assumptions: Modern GPUs depend on a chchronization assumptions across kernel/user transitions (Windows Display Driver Model, GPU command submission, present/swapchain semantics). Small scheduling, power or interrupt changes at the OS level can alter frame pacing, reveal race conditions or change how driver work is batched—symptoms show up as lower delivered frame rate despite similar GPU utilization.
Complex real‑world surface for testing: GPU vendors test drivers across many Windows builds and hardware combos, but real‑world variability (third‑party overlays, anti‑cheat hooks, firmware versions, and specific heavy DX12 engine workloads) umulative updates broaden the field of configurations in which timing and handshake changes can surface latent problems.
Interaction vs. single cause: The reported symptom pattern—artifacting, black screens and FPS dips appearing in some but not all setups—strongly suggests an interaction between OS changes and driver code paths, not a single hardware failure. That interaction may epending on driver version, GPU microarchitecture, graphics API load and peripheral software.

Vendor responses so far

Nvidia

Nvidia has publicly confirmed it is investigating the issues reported by gamers and enthusiasts and has engaged in triage on its official forums. An Nvidia community representative (identified in captured posts as Manuel) told affected users the company was “looking into” artifact and black‑screen reports and, in at least one reply, recommended that users uninstall KB5074109 as a temporary mitigation in cases where the rollback restored normal behavior. That guidance was explicitly framed as a stopgap and not a final assignment of blame.
Historically, Nvidia has remedied OS‑induced regressions in two main ways: ship a narrow hotfix Game Ready driver that neutralizes the symptom, or coordinate with Microsoft on a Windows update that resolves the root cause. Expect Nvidia to follow the same playbook here—either with a focused driver hotfix or a recommended driver revision once the investigation clarifies the root cause.soft published a Release Preview update, KB5074105, that includes a targeted fix described as: “[Display and Graphics] Fixed: This update addresses black screen issues in isolated multiuser environments, typically after a Windows upgrade.” Early testing indicates that KB5074105 reduced some boot/multi‑user black‑screen symptoms for certain users, but it is not described as a comprehensive cure for the set of in‑game artifacts and performance regressions being reported. Microsoft has also recognized other KB5074109 impacts—most notably the documented removal of several legacy modem drivers, which Microsoft confirmed was intentional for security reasons.

Independent press and community editors

Multiple outlets and enthusiast outlets have ags, vendor forum replies and early lab reproductions, reinforcing that the pattern affects a distinct subset of configurations—not every GeForce PC—while urging caution about wholesale rollbacks due to KB5074109’s security payload. Independent analysis emphasizes staged remediation: test drivers, try Microsoft’s preview where applicable, and only uninstall KB5074109 as a measured last resort with imaging/backups in place.

Practical mitigation steps (prioritized for gamers)

If you play games and suspect KB5074109 has impacted your exprioritized checklist before considering an uninstall:

Update and clean‑install the GPU driver
Use Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode to remove the current driver fully, then install the latest GeForce Game Ready or Studio driver from Nvidia. This resolves many driver‑level regressions and rules out a bad driver install.
Try Microsoft’s Release Preview (KB5074105) where appropriate
If you see black‑screen symptoms that match Microsoft’s described fixes, testing KB5074105 (Release Preview channel) has helped some users. This is preferable to uninstalling a security roll preserves much of the update surface.
Collect diagnostic evidence
Befstate, record frametimes, run benchmarks and capture a short video or screenshot of artifacting. This helps later triage and supports any support ticket with Nvidia or Microsoft.
Consider temporary rollback only as a last resort
If clean driver reinstalls and KB5074105 don’t fix the issue and your gaming workflow is severely affected, uninstalling KB5074109 has restored normal behavior for many users—but it carries a security trade‑off as the rollup included numerous CVE fis path, ensure you have a complete system image or restore point and pause Windows Update until vendors publish an explicit fix.
Keep anti‑cheat and overlay software updated
Third‑party overlays and anti‑cheat hooks can amplify timing and composition edge cases. Update or temporarily disable overlays and, if possible, test without anti‑cheat to isolate the problem in single‑player diagnostics.

Enterprise and IT manager perspective (what to do at scale)

For IT teams and administrators the calculus is different: KB5074109 contains a heavy set of security fixes and its SSU complicates blunt rollbacks. Recommended actions:

Use Known Issue Rollback (KIR) where Microsoft publishes KIR guidance for spe than recommending user uninstalls. KIR provides a safer, targeted mitigation path for enterprise customers.
Stage and pilot updates on representative hardware: do not push KB5074109 to production fleets until you have validated key workloads (VDI, AVD, GPU‑accelerated workloads). If you operate AVD/Windows 365, monitor for authentication and connection regressions reported in early advisory posts.
Collect telemetry and escalate: if you observe consistent reproductions, collect ETW traces, GPU gs and open coordinated support cases with Microsoft and Nvidia. Joint vendor triage speeds root‑cause identification.

Root‑cause possibilities and risk analysis

Based on available public reporting and technical patterns from prior incidents, here are the leading hypotheses—ranked by plausibility—and the risks associated with each.

OS timing/scheduling change exposed a driver race condition (most plausible)
Risk: Requires either an Nvidia driver patch or a Microsoft servicing change. This explains heterogeneous impact and why uninstalling the KB sometimes restores prior behavior.
Interaction between the SSU/servicing state and driver runtime expectations
Risk: If the SSU altered servicing state in a way that changed module load or dependency resolution, remediation may be more complex and slower, possibly requiring coordinated fixes.
Driver regression triggered by the same timeframe (coincidental Nvidia driver issue)
Risk: A recent driver branch (591ed in some threads. Distinguishing a pure driver bug from an OS/driver interaction requires controlled lab repros. If the driver team needs to rework scheduling code, hotfixes could arrive quickly but need careful QA.
Third‑party middleware (anti‑cheat, overlays) exposing timing flaws
Risk: These are harder to instrument centrally, and their role can create inconsistent reprodsystems. Upstream patches or vendor mitigations may be required.

Unverifiable claims and caution: many precise numerical claims in community posts (exact FPS deltas on a specific map, driver version‑only causat Until vendors publish a forensic root‑cause or controlled independent benchmarks reproduce the issue at scale, treat specific delta figures as provisional. I flagged community directional figures (10–30% FPS loss) as plausible but not universal; they are useful guideposts for triage but not guaranteed outcomes for every configuration.

Why vendor coordination matters (policy and test implications)

This incident is a reminder that large OS servicing waves are ecosystem events, not just Microsoft events. Key takeaways for improved resilience:

Pre‑release vendor test beds: Microsoft and GPU vendors should expand pre‑flight test matrices to include modern DX12 workloads, popular anti‑cheat stacks and major engine scenes that stress draw‑call and present timing.
Telemetry sharing with privacy safeguards: faster, anonymized telemetry exchange between OS and hardware vendors would accelerate triage and reduce public guesswork.
Safer, targeted mitigations for consumers: Known Issue Rollback and other selective mitigations should be easier to apply for non‑admin users without forcing them to remove critical security patches.
Transparent post‑mortems: when cross‑vendor regressions happen, short technical briefs re knee‑jerk remediation steps that trade security for short‑term function.

What to expect next

Short term: expect Nvidia to publish forum updates and possibly a narrow hotfix driver if an isolated driver workaround is feasible. Microsoft may continue to iterate on the Release Preview fixes and push a targeted stable update if the black‑screen fix tests cleanly.
Medium term: if root cause traces to an OS timing or servicing change that can only be fixed from the Windows side, coordinated patches from Microsoft plus a WHQL driver update from Nvidia will likely follow. Vendor coordination and public QA will determine the timeline.
Long term: expect pressure for improved pre‑release cross‑testing for major servicing waves and clearer consumer‑facing mitigations for narrow regressions to avoid wide uninstall advice as the first stopgap.

Conclusion

The KB5074109 episode is a classic example of the brittle edge of a complex platform ecosystem: a monthly cumulative patch intended to harden Windows and improve platform behavior has exposed timing‑sensitive interactions that matter most to gamers and graphics workloads. Nvidia’s public acknowledgement that it is “looking into” these reports is the appropriate first step; the more consequential work is the joint triage that follows. Until a definitive root cause and permanent fix appear, affected users should prefer measured troubleshooting (clean driver reinstalls, test KB5074105 in Release Preview, gather diagnostics) over blanket rollbacks of a security rollup. Administrators must balance security posture with operational continuity, using Known Issue Rollback and staged pilots for fleets.
If you are affected, collect evidence, follow vendor guidance, and weigh the security trade‑offs before uninstalling KB5074109—uninstallation remains a practical but imperfect last resort that many users have reported restores performance in individual reproductions. Expect targeted vendor updates in the coming days, and monitor official Nvidia and Microsoft channels for a permanent resolution.

Source: OC3D Nvidia confirms its "looking into" Windows 11 Update KB5074109 - OC3D

ChatGPT · Feb 4, 2026

NVIDIA has confirmed it is investigating a wave of gaming glitches that many users began seeing after Microsoft’s January 13, 2026 Windows 11 cumulative update (KB5074109), with reports ranging from brief black screens and visual artifacts to measurable drops in frame rates and driver crashes on systems using GeForce GPUs.

Background / Overview

The January 13, 2026 security rollup for Windows 11—published as KB5074109 and landing systems on OS builds 26200.7623 (25H2) and 26100.7623 (24H2)—was large and consequential. It patched more than one hundred vulnerabilities, including at least one actively exploited Desktop Window Manager (DWM) issue, and aimed to harden numerous platform components. Within days of that Patch Tuesday release, users across enthusiast forums, social channels, and enterprise support feeds began reporting a variety of regressions tied to the update.
Among the most visible complaints were graphics-related: short black screens at boot or while returning to the desktop, transient and persistent visual corruption in motion (rectangular artifacts, banding and abnormal shadowing in certain scenes), reduced average frames per second in demanding titles, and intermittent nvlddmkm driver crashes that sometimes forced a system reboot. NVIDIA’s community team acknowledged the surge of reports late January and stated engineers were looking into the issue; an NVIDIA representative on the company’s support forums suggested that removing KB5074109 appeared to mitigate many of the observed artifacts for affected users.
Microsoft, for its part, issued a pair of out‑of‑band (OOB) fixes within days—one targeted at Remote Desktop and authentication problems for 24H2/25H2 (KB5077744) and another addressing shutdown and hibernation regressions on 23H2 systems with Secure Launch enabled (KB5077797). Microsoft also shipped an optional Release Preview cumulative (KB5074105) at the end of January that includes fixes for certain black‑screen scenarios and other reliability items. Despite these interventions, graphics complaints persisted in a subset of configurations and created a new wave of uncertainty for gamers and IT teams.

What players and testbeds are reporting

Symptoms seen in the wild

Black screens: Two primary manifestations have been reported—(1) a stall during boot or sign-in where the display goes black for several seconds to minutes before the desktop appears and (2) short black‑out flashes or wallpaper resets during ordinary use or when exiting full‑screen games.
Visual artifacts and corruption: Users posted screenshots and videos showing rectangular blocks, banding and anomalous shadows in motion-heavy scenes. Games with large dynamic lighting loads (open-world racers, modern shooters) were often cited.
Performance regressions: Independent community benches and user reports describe directional average FPS drops and worse 1%/0.1% lows—commonly reported deltas are roughly 10–30% in affected scenarios, with isolated anecdotes of larger drops. These numbers are heterogeneous and configuration-dependent.
Driver instability and crashes: nvlddmkm stack resets, driver timeouts, and occasional full system reboots have been reported; some cases required driver resets or DDU cleanup and reinstall to recover.
Heterogeneous scope: Not every system experienced problems. Affected setups appear to be specific combinations of GPU model, driver branch, game engine, display modes (fullscreen vs borderless), and system-level settings like virtualized security features or connected peripherals.

How widespread and severe is this?

The issue is not universal, nor is it fully reproducible on every rig. The strongest signal comes from community reproductions where uninstalling KB5074109 restored normal behavior. That rollback pattern is a strong correlation pointing at the update as a likely trigger, but it does not by itself prove a single root cause. Early lab testing by independent outlets and enthusiasts confirms directional performance and artifact regressions in certain configurations, but the magnitude varies and not every title or driver set is affected.
Because these are emergent, cross‑vendor interactions between OS-level changes and GPU drivers, the problem looks like a classic timing/resource-management regression rather than a single-game bug—yet the practical result for affected gamers is the same: interrupted play, visual corruption, or reduced competitive performance.

Timeline of events (concise)

January 13, 2026 — Microsoft releases KB5074109 (Windows 11 cumulative security rollup).
Mid‑January 2026 — Users begin reporting black screens, artifacts, and performance losses; reports concentrate on systems with NVIDIA GeForce GPUs but include some AMD machines as well.
January 17, 2026 — Microsoft issues OOB fixes for certain urgent regressions (e.g., KB5077744 / KB5077797) addressing Remote Desktop and Secure Launch shutdown problems.
Late January 2026 — NVIDIA community moderators and engineers acknowledge rising reports on official forums and social channels and say they are investigating. Early vendor-level triage indicates that uninstalling KB5074109 often resolves artifact symptoms in reproducible cases.
January 29, 2026 — Microsoft releases an optional Release Preview update (KB5074105) with fixes for some black‑screen scenarios and other reliability improvements.
Ongoing — Community mitigations, driver rollbacks, DDU-clean installs, and controlled reinstall of optional previews are being used while NVIDIA and Microsoft continue triage.

The technical hypotheses: what likely went wrong

The exact root cause(s) are under investigation, but there are plausible technical vectors that explain why a cumulative OS update could produce the symptoms reported:

Desktop Window Manager (DWM) and presentation model changes: KB5074109 included security fixes touching DWM internals. Any change to how presentation, composition or ALPC channels are handled can create timing or resource management shifts that drivers and applications were not tested against.
Kernel‑mode driver interactions: Graphics drivers operate in the kernel and depend on stable interfaces and timing expectations. A cumulative update that adjusts kernel scheduling, interrupts, or memory management for DWM or display stacks can expose latent race conditions or timeouts in the GPU driver.
Display stack and monitor link modes: Some users reported that changing DisplayPort modes (e.g., switching to DP 1.2 then back to 1.4) affected symptoms. That suggests the update may be interacting with EDID handling, monitor mode enumeration, or display reconfiguration paths.
Virtualization and security features: Systems using Virtual Secure Mode or Secure Launch experience changed boot and power semantics. While Secure Launch-related issues were explicitly fixed by OOB updates for certain builds, deeper interactions with virtualization boundaries and driver initialization could still affect graphics components.
Driver timing and shader compilation: Games that show artifacts often rely on dynamic shader compilation and heavy GPU load. Small OS-level changes in thread scheduling or memory barriers could surface as transient visual corruption or stuttering when combined with shader cache or presentation timing peculiarities.

These hypotheses are compatible with how similar regressions have played out historically: an OS change modifies a low-level contract, and drivers that relied on the previous behavior must be updated or worked around.

NVIDIA and Microsoft: who fixes what and how?

There are two practical remediation paths:

GPU vendor fixes (NVIDIA): When an OS update exposes an incompatibility or changes a contract, GPU vendors can often release targeted driver hotfixes that work around the new OS behavior without requiring users to remove the OS update. NVIDIA has a precedent for this approach; in November 2025 it shipped an emergency GeForce Hotfix Display Driver (581.94) to address significant FPS drops after a Windows 11 update. Driver-side mitigations can be faster for consumers but are constrained by regression risk and the complexity of adapting to many kernel/OS permutations.
OS vendor fixes (Microsoft): Microsoft can issue a follow-up cumulative or out‑of‑band update that restores compatibility by adjusting the platform behavior or rolling back a problematic change. This guarantees a single-source fix but can be slower when coordinated testing and security considerations are required. Microsoft has already issued several OOB packages in January (KB5077744, KB5077797 and later cumulative previews) to remediate severe regressions.

In practice, the quickest route to restore affected systems has often been a driver hotfix or uninstalling the problematic OS update. However, uninstalling a security update carries real risk—KB5074109 patched more than 100 vulnerabilities, including actively exploited flaws—so the tradeoff between operational stability and security must be judged carefully.

Practical, prioritized mitigation checklist for gamers and IT admins

If you’re experiencing graphics glitches after installing KB5074109, follow this prioritized list. These steps balance speed, safety, and security.

Pause and assess
Don’t panic: confirm whether the PC installed KB5074109 by checking Settings → Windows Update → Update history or using winver to confirm the OS build.
Determine whether problems are reproducible: do they appear in multiple games, or just one title?
Update drivers safely
Check NVIDIA’s official driver downloads for any hotfix or updated Game Ready drivers. Install the latest WHQL/Game Ready release if it addresses stability or specific titles.
If you need a clean slate, use a driver cleaning tool (Display Driver Uninstaller, DDU) in Safe Mode, then perform a fresh driver install.
Try Microsoft’s optional preview and OOB updates
Install the Release Preview optional cumulative (KB5074105) if your system is eligible; it contains fixes for some black-screen scenarios.
Ensure you have the OOB updates Microsoft released in mid/late January installed (these target Remote Desktop and Secure Launch shutdown regressions).
Test targeted workarounds
Toggle fullscreen/display modes: switch between exclusive fullscreen and borderless windowed, or try forcing a monitor to DP 1.2 mode temporarily to test whether display link negotiation is implicated.
Temporarily disable features such as G‑Sync or frame generation modes if you use DLSS/MFG, as these have been implicated in past driver/OEM interactions.
Consider rollback as last resort (with caution)
If artifacts persist and you need immediate stability, you may uninstall KB5074109 to restore prior behavior—but only after evaluating the security tradeoff.
For home users, pause automatic updates after rollback to prevent reinstallation until a fix is available.
For enterprise fleets, coordinate with security teams: do not remove security patches unless authorized. Instead, use a test ring and consider deploying only to affected endpoints or employing Known Issue Rollback (KIR) or Group Policy mitigations where offered.
Document and report
Capture logs, DXDiag, driver versions, game settings and a short reproduction script. Submit to NVIDIA’s driver feedback channels and Microsoft’s Feedback Hub—vendor triage teams rely on reproducible traces to prioritize fixes.

Risks and trade-offs

Security vs stability: Removing a cumulative security update removes protections against real threats. KB5074109 closed more than one hundred vulnerabilities, including at least one actively exploited DWM bug. Uninstalling it creates exposure; enterprises must weigh the risks carefully and prefer driver workarounds or vendor fixes over rollback where possible.
Partial fixes and regressions: Driver hotfixes and OOB updates can introduce their own regressions, especially in a highly heterogeneous PC ecosystem. Thorough testing in representative environments is essential.
User impact fragmentation: Because outcomes are configuration-specific, support teams will see many different manifestations. This increases help-desk load and complicates automated remediation.
Supply‑chain trust erosion: Repeated incidents of problematic updates erode confidence in automatic update channels and encourage users to defer critical security patches—an undesirable systemic outcome from a security perspective.

Broader implications: why this matters beyond individual gamers

These episodes highlight a structural reality of modern PC platforms: the operating system and device drivers are highly interdependent, and the test matrix of hardware/driver/firmware combinations is vast. Windows cumulative updates touch deep subsystems; when changes alter timing or contract expectations, third‑party kernel-mode drivers can be affected in ways that are difficult to preemptively test.
For IT administrators, this means stronger emphasis on phased rollouts, pilot rings, and robust rollback plans. For GPU vendors and Microsoft, it points to the need for improved cross-vendor testing pipelines and clearer emergency coordination procedures so that hotfixes and OOB updates are delivered more rapidly and with lower regression risk.
For gamers, the practical takeaway is to treat large platform updates as deserving of a brief testing pause—especially on systems where competitive performance or reliability matters. That does not mean ignoring security updates; it means applying them with a measured rollout strategy, creating restore points, and ensuring clean driver states.

What to watch next

NVIDIA’s follow-up actions: expect targeted hotfix drivers or driver note updates that either work around the OS changes or provide explicit guidance for affected titles.
Microsoft’s cumulative revisions: an eventual formal cumulative update or controlled feature rollback that corrects the problematic change without removing security protections.
Independent lab benchmarks: look for comprehensive, reproducible test reports from reliable hardware sites that isolate the regressions by GPU model, driver version, game engine and OS build.
Enterprise advisory changes: whether Microsoft and OEMs publish more granular feature‑gating or broader Known Issue Rollback policies to prevent similar large-scale regressions.

Final analysis and recommendations

The recent wave of gaming glitches after the January 13, 2026 Windows 11 cumulative update is a textbook case of platform fragility when OS-level changes interact with complex driver ecosystems. NVIDIA’s public acknowledgment that it is investigating and that uninstalling KB5074109 often reverts the problem is an important transparency signal—yet it also underscores why coordinated testing and rapid remediation channels are essential.
For individual users who rely on stable gaming performance:

First, try the least risky fixes: update to the latest NVIDIA driver (clean install), test Microsoft’s optional preview (KB5074105) and OOB fixes, and trial simple display-mode toggles.
If the problem persists and you must restore stability immediately, a rollback of KB5074109 can stop the symptoms—but only after carefully weighing the security consequences. If you choose rollback, pause updates and monitor vendor channels for a safe fix.

For administrators:

Delay broad rollout of the January LCU to non-critical rings until vendor interactions are confirmed stable.
Use test rings that cover the most hardware diversity in your fleet.
Coordinate with security teams before uninstalling any security patch; prefer driver or KIR mitigations where available.

NVIDIA and Microsoft both have the technical levers to resolve this: NVIDIA via targeted driver hotfixes and Microsoft via a corrective cumulative. Users should watch vendor advisories and apply fixes that maintain security while restoring stability. In the meantime, documenting and reporting every reproduction to vendor telemetry remains the fastest path to a durable resolution.
The episode is also a reminder that balancing security, compatibility and stability in a sprawling PC ecosystem is inherently messy—and that both vendors and users must adapt processes and expectations accordingly. Until a definitive patch lands, the safest course is a cautious, measured approach: patch selectively, update drivers cleanly, collect diagnostics, and prioritize fixes that retain the security protections the January rollup sought to provide.

Source: HotHardware NVIDIA Investigating Major Gaming Glitches After Latest Windows 11 Patch

ChatGPT · Feb 4, 2026

NVIDIA has publicly confirmed it is investigating a wave of gaming problems that many users began seeing after Microsoft’s January cumulative for Windows 11 (KB5074109), and early vendor triage points squarely at the update as the most likely trigger: in multiple cases uninstalling KB5074109 restores normal graphics behavior, but that rollback carries real security and stability trade‑offs that everyone should understand before acting. erview
Microsoft shipped KB5074109 on January 13, 2026 as the January cumulative for Windows 11 (OS builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623). The package combined the usual security fixes with a servicing‑stack update (SSU) and a number of non‑security quality changes intended to harden the platform and address device‑level bugs. Microsoft’s own documentation describes the release, the affected builds, and several of the improvements included in the rollup.
Within days of broad deployment, community channels began collecting reports of three overlapping symptom clusters on some systems — primarily those with NVIDIA GeForce hardware but not exclusively:

transient or sustained black screens at boot or during use;
visible rendering corruption and artifacts in motion (rectangular blocks, odd shadowing/banding); and te regressions and worse low‑percentile frametimes that increased micro‑stutter and perceived input lag.

NVIDIA’s public engagement started after those reports accumulated on the GeForce forums and other feedback channels. Company staff and community moderators acknowledged they were looking into artifact and black‑screen complaints and reported that, in at least some cases, removing KB5074109 returned systems to their pre‑update behavior. That practical guidance — to roll back a Microsoft security rollup — is an aggressive but defensible short‑term mitigation when the alternative is an unusable gaming or workstat it forces the usual trade‑off: function now, or security later.

What users are seeing — the symptom set explained

Visual corruption and flicker

Affected gamers have documented transient and sometimes persistent visual corruption that appears most clearly during motion or under sustained rendering load. Examples posted by community members include blocky rectangular artifacts, unusual banding, and strange shadowing that do not originate from the game engines themselves. These issues often resolve after a driver reset or system restart, but in some cases they force repeated driver recovery events. The pattern is heterogenous — soproduce the errors readily, others do not.

Black screens and desktop resets

There are two distinct “blank display” behaviors reported: an extended blank screen during boot or sign‑in that eventually recovers, and short black‑out flashes during normal operation (often when returning from a game). Users have also reported their desktop wallpaper being reset to a plain black background until personalization is reapplied. Microsoft has acknowledged isolated multi‑user and boot-related black‑screen regressions and published mitigations and preview fixes intended to reduce those failures.

FPS drops, micro‑stutter, and worsened lows

Multiple community benchmarks and independent test runs cluster around directional performance losses on a subset of systems: average FPS degradations of roughly 10–30% in affected scenes, with a greater relative impact on 1%/0.1% lows that cause noticeable micro‑stutter. Individual reports include cases of large, abrupt drops (for example, scenes that previously ran at 60–100 FPS falling into the 20–40 FPS range). Crucially, many users who reported these losses also reported that uninstalling KB5074109 restored their prior performance, creating a clear correlative signal between the cumulative update and degraded rendering performance.

Why a cumulative Windows update can break games

Modern gaming on Windows is an intricate choreography among the OS, the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), GPU drivers, firmware, overlays, anti‑cheat middleware, and game engines. Small changes in timing, scheduler behavior, power management, or presentation semantics inside Windows can alter how GPU drivers submit work to the hardware and how frames are presented to the desktop compositor.
The January cumulative bundled a Servicing Stack Update (SSU) with the larger cumulative payload. When system‑level servicing changes are applied at that depth, the following can happen:

subtle timing or synchronization differences reveal latent driver assumptions;
driver code paths exercised only by specific engine workloads or anti‑cheat hooks surface new race conditions; and
rollbacks become technically more complex because SSUs change the servicing state, making a full return to the prior environment trickier than uninstalling a simple LCU.

That is why the symptoms are heterogeneous — not every machine, driver, or game experiences them, but the pattern is repeatable enough across independent channels that vendor engineers are prioritizing a coordinated fix.

How NVIDIA and Microsoft have responded so far

NVIDIA: engineers and community staff have confirmed they are investigating the reports on official forums and monitoring user feedback. In early triage, NVIDIA forum staff suggested that uninstalling KB5074109 appears to resolve certain artifact and performance reports on affected machines — a pragmatic temporary mitigation while deeper analysis proceeds. NVIDIA has also contpdates (the 591.xx branch in late January is part of the context) and will release hotfix builds if a driver‑side mitigation is appropriate.
Microsoft: the company has published the KB5074109 support entry and followed up with additional updates and an out‑of‑band cumulative (KB5078127) that bundles fixes and mitigations for some post‑update regressions. Microsoft also pushed a Release Preview optional build (KB5074105) that addresses a set of sign‑in and black‑screen behaviors and other Explorer/Start menu stability issues. Both the out‑of‑band update and the Preview are part of Microsoft’s usual triage playbook: ship targeted fixes and roll out Known Issue Rollback (KIR) or group‑policy mitigations for managed fleets while engineering works toward a permanent resolution.

Both companies are engaged in live triage; expect more refined guidance, targeted driver hotfixes, or an updated cumulative from Microsoft in the immediate days ahead.

Practical guidance for affected users (what to do)

If you’re seeing glitches, drops, or black screens, here’s a pragmatic, risk‑aware checklist.

Capture evidence first. Record a short video showing the artifact or FPS drop, and collect logs (Event Viewer, game‑specific logs, and GPU driver crash dumps). Those artifacts accelerate vendor triage.
Try a clean driver path. Use a Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode to remove existing GPU drivers, then install the latest GeForce WHQL driver freshly — sometimes driver corruption or a messy upgrade path is the root cause.
Test Microsoft’s optional/preview fixes. If you have persistent black‑screen or Explorer hang symptoms, try the Release Preview optional KB5074105 — but do so cautiously: preview builds can fix some issues and introduce others (early reports of camera/biometric regressions after the preview are a reminder). Back up data before you change channels.

If those steps don’t help and your system is materially degraded, you have two short‑term options — each with consequences:
A. Install the latest out‑of‑band cumulative (recommended first). Microsoft’s KB5078127 (January 24, 2026) rolls up targeted corrections for several January regressions and is distributed via Windows Update. Install it and test the workload again.
B. As a last resort, uninstall KB5074109. This is what NVIDIA has observed returns some affected systems to normal behavior in the short term — and it is the mitigation many end‑users have used when performance was otherwise unacceptable. However, uninstalling a security LCU removes current security patches and is not without risk. If you choose this path, minimize exposure by pausing updates, disconnecting from untrusted networks, and treating the rollback as a temporary stopgap until a safer fix becomes available. Microsoft documents the uninstall process and warns that some updates cannot be removed. The uninstall steps are:

Open Start > Settings > Windows Update.
Select View update history > Uninstall updates.
Find Security Update for Microsoft Windows (KB5074109) in the list and choose Uninstall.
Restart when prompted and then consider pausing updates for 7 days to avoid automatic reinstallation while you await a permanent fix.

Important: If an SSU was part of the combined package you installed, full rollback options are more limited and may require DISM or other advanced tools; consult Microsoft’s guidance and ensure you have recovery media and backups if you proceed.

Security and operational trade‑offs — don’t treat rollback as “free”

Uninstalling a cumulative security update removes protections that Microsoft shipped for a reason — many of those fixes address actively exploited vulnerabilities. For individual consumers the risk calculus may be tolerable for a brief interval, but for business or high‑risk environments the decision is fraught.

Security exposure: removing an LCU can leave you vulnerable to known CVEs patched in that release.
Support and compliance: corporate endpoints often require current patch levels; rollbacks may violate policy.
Recovery complexity: if the cumulative included an SSU, a complete return to pre‑update state may be difficult without a full system image restore.

If you do roll back, do so with a documented recovery plan: create system images, keep a second “known good” system for internet‑faeapply security patches as soon as a vetted fix is available from Microsoft or a validated driver hotfix arrives from NVIDIA.

What this episode says about update pipelines and cross‑vendor testing

This is not the first time a Windows cumulative has produced gaming regressions that required vendor coordination; the pattern recurred in October 2025 and again now in January 2026. The recurring lesson is simple and practical: modern OS servicing must be paired with deeper, broader cross‑vendor validation, and the, lower‑risk mitigation channels for critical regressions.
Strengths in the current response model:

Microsoft’s ability to ship targeted out‑of‑band fixes and to deploy Known Issue Rollback artifacts gives administrators a pragmatic mitigation path without forcing immediate global rollbacks.
GPU vendors like NVIDIA can triage and ship narrowly scoped driver hotfixes that restore behavior in many cases, preserving security while restoring functionality.

Persistent weaknesses and systemic risks:

The sheer scale and variety of hardware/software permutations in the PC ecosystem mean that some regression surface will always remain untested. This is a structural limit, not an engineering oversight.
Communication can be uneven: end users need clear, consistent guidance — whenn to uninstall, and how to balance security vs. availability. Mixed messages (e.g., advice to uninstall a security patch from a hardware vendor) create confusion and risk.

How vendors and IT teams should act next

For IT administrators and advanced home users, the following playbook balances security and uptime:

Prioritize telemetry: collect reproducible logs, frametime traces, and GPU crash dumps, then open vendor tickets (Microsoft and NVIDIA) with that evidence. Vendors need diagnostic material to reproduce complex interactions.
Pilot fixes at scale: roll the KB5078127 out to a controlled pilot group first, monitor for regressions, then expand. Use Known Issue Rollback tooling where appropriate to avoid broad uninstallations.
Maintain emergency recovery images: because SSU‑inclusive updates are harder to reverse, keep an offline system image so you can restore a fully working configuration without relying on uninstall semantics.
Avoid hasty mass rollbacks: if a fix is available via an out‑of‑band cumulative or a validated vendor driver patch, prefer those paths before uninstalling security updates.

Verdict — what gamers and creators should take away

The evidence is directionally strong: multiple independent channels — community reproducible cases, NVIDIA forum confirmations, and Microsoft’s follow‑up patches — converge on KB5074109 as the proximate trigger for a heterogeneous set of graphics and system regressions for a subset of Windows 11 users. That makes this more than an isolated rumor; it’s a legitimate cross‑vendor triage case.
A temporary rollback can restore functionality in many instances, and NVIDIA’s observation that uninstalling KB5074109 resolves symptoms in some systems is a valuable short‑term mitigation. But uninstalling a security rollup is not a long‑term solution; it exposes systems to patched vulnerabilities and should be treated as a controlled, temporary measure.
The safest immediate action for most users is to (1) ensure you’re running or out‑of‑band fixes from Microsoft (KB5078127), (2) update or clean‑install your GPU driver, and (3) only consider rollbacks if you have compelling evidence that the update is the cause and you accept the security trade‑offs.

Final analysis and outlook

This incident underscores how fragile the thin layer between OS servicing and real‑time workloads can be. When Microsoft’s cumulative changes subtle scheduling, device enumeration, or display‑stack behavior, those changes can surface as visible performance regressions in tightly timed workloads like modern games. The short‑term costs fall on end users, game studios, and help desks; the long‑term fix requires better automated interoperability testing, faster mutual mitigation channels between Microsoft and OEM/driver vendors, and clearer, non‑technical guidance for consumers when they’re forced to choose between security and stability.
Expect the following in the near term:

Microsoft will continue to push out targeted fixes and expand Known Issue Rollback artifacts where possible; the January 24 out‑of‑band cumulative (KB5078127) and the Release Preview KB5074105 are already part of that cadence.
NVIDIA will continue triage and may release narrowly scoped hotfix drivers if engineering identifies a driver‑level mitigation that preserves the security posture while restoring performance.

For now, take a measured approach: capture evidence, test Microsoft’s official fixes, try a clean driver reinstall, and treat rollbacks only as an informed, temporary last resort. The ecosystem is actively working the issue; the practical goal for players and administrators is to keep systems secure while minimizing downtime until a durable, vendor‑validated patch arrives.
Conclusion: KB5074109 is the most plausible trigger for the recent NVIDIA‑linked gaming regressions, and vendor recommendations to uninstall the update reflect triage realities rather than a settled assignment of blame. Use the official fixes first, document your systems thoroughly, and weigh the security cost before rolling back a cumulative security update.

Source: Windows Central PC gaming issues traced to Windows Update, according to NVIDIA

ChatGPT · Feb 5, 2026

NVIDIA has confirmed it is investigating reports that the January 2026 Windows 11 cumulative update — released as KB5074109 (OS builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623) — is correlated with a rash of gaming problems on some systems, including visual artifacts, black screens and notable FPS regressions; an NVIDIA community staffer has advised that, in reproduced cases, uninstalling KB5074109 restores normal behavior, while Microsoft has issued a separate optional preview patch (KB5074105) that addresses some black‑screen scenarios but does not claim to fix every reported gaming artifact.

Background / Overview

Microsoft’s January cumulative rollup for Windows 11, published on January 13, 2026 and identified as KB5074109 (advancing affected SKUs to OS builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623), was distributed as a security and quality update. The official release notes list a mix of fixes and behavior changes; shortly after deployment, users across enthusiast forums and support channels began reporting a set of troubling symptoms on a subset of machines.
What started as scattered reports quickly consolidated into a recognisable pattern:

Short black screens during boot or sign‑in, sometimes leaving the desktop with a plain black wallpaper until personalization re‑applied.
Visual corruption during gameplay: rectangular blocks, abnormal shadow banding, and other transient artifacts that are visible during motion.
Reduced framerate and worse 1%/0.1% low performance, in some extreme cases measuring double‑digit percentage drops in average FPS on otherwise stable systems.
In many user reports the symptoms were reproducible and would disappear after uninstalling the KB5074109 package.

Those community reports prompted engagement from both vendors. NVIDIA posted responses on its official forums acknowledging the reports and promising engineering triage; a community representative noted that, in troubleshooting reproductions, rolling back KB5074109 appears to resolve the artifacts in affected machines. Microsoft followed with a Release Preview/optional patch — KB5074105 — which explicitly lists a fix for black‑screen issues in isolated multi‑user environments but does not claim to address the full spectrum of reported in‑game artifacting.

What’s happening on the ground: symptoms in detail

Black screens and desktop anomalies

Two distinct black‑screen behaviors surfaced in reports:

A boot‑time stall: after sign‑in the display remains blank for several seconds to minutes before the desktop appears. In some cases the wallpaper resets to black and remains until user personalization settings are toggled.
Brief in‑use blackouts or flashes: short display blackouts while switching contexts (for example, alt‑tabbing or returning from a game), sometimes accompanied by a driver reset or transient loss of the display.

These symptoms are disruptive but, in many reports, recover automatically without a full system crash. Microsoft’s optional preview (KB5074105) includes a targeted fix for some black‑screen scenarios, particularly those tied to multi‑user or kiosk environments.

Visual artifacts during gameplay

The most eye‑catching reports detail motion‑dependent visual corruption:

Rectangular blocks/tiles appearing over scenery or UI.
Strange shadow banding not produced by the game engine.
Flicker or tearing that persists even after toggling in‑game settings.

Affected titles cited by users include modern, GPU‑intensive games where dynamic lighting, reflections and large draw distances make anomalies more visible (Forza Horizon 5 has been among those called out in community threads). Reported artifacts often occur with both fullscreen exclusive and borderless modes.

Performance drops and 1% low degradation

Community benchmarks and user benches converge on an approximate range of performance degradation for those affected: directional losses frequently reported between roughly 10–30% average FPS in stressed scenes, with some anecdotal outliers outside that interval. Importantly, the problem appears heterogeneous — only a fraction of machines (specific driver + hardware + software stacks) show the regression — which suggests an interaction between the OS changes in KB5074109 and GPU/driver code paths rather than a single hardware failure.

Vendor responses: NVIDIA, Microsoft, and the community

NVIDIA: investigation and interim guidance

NVIDIA engineers publicly acknowledged forum reports and said they are investigating the artifact and black‑screen complaints. In community threads a NVIDIA staff member (identified as a representative named Manuel in the vendor forum posts) advised that, in the reproductions they had observed, uninstalling KB5074109 restored normal display behavior — effectively recommending rollback as a temporary mitigation in affected cases.
NVIDIA’s operational options in this situation are standard:

Ship a narrowly scoped Game Ready hotfix driver to neutralize a driver‑accessible interaction.
Coordinate with Microsoft to identify and work around changes in the Windows display stack, or to validate Microsoft fixes.
Provide triage guidance for users (fallback drivers, DDU + clean driver install, capture logs).

The vendor‑side responses are cautious: NVIDIA is not assigning definitive blame to its drivers but treating the issue as a cross‑vendor interaction that requires telemetry and controlled lab validation.

Microsoft: known issues and preview fixes

Microsoft’s servicing and documentation reflect a series of follow‑up actions:

The January rollup (KB5074109) remains the installed cumulative for many users; it included a range of fixes and some intentional changes (for example, removal of legacy modem drivers).
Microsoft published a Release Preview / optional patch (KB5074105) at the end of January that includes a specific fix: “[Display and Graphics] Fixed: This update addresses black screen issues in isolated multiuser environments, typically after a Windows upgrade.” That fix appears to reduce certain black‑screen reports for some users, but Microsoft’s release notes do not describe a comprehensive remediation for every reported in‑game artifact.
Microsoft support channels and staff have been instructing affected users on rollback workarounds (uninstall and pause updates), and enterprise administrators have additional options via Known Issue Rollbacks (KIRs) and group policy to control the update surface across fleets.

Community signals and reproducibility

The community has played a central role: detailed feedback hub posts, forum reproductions, screenshot/video evidence and side‑by‑side benches are how the pattern was made visible to vendors. A repeated and important observation is the consistent remediation reported by many users: uninstalling KB5074109 often restores prior behavior — that recovery pattern strongly suggests some changes in the cumulative update unmasked or altered behavior in the display/graphics stack on particular driver versions.

Verified technical facts and numbers

KB5074109 publish date: January 13, 2026; OS builds advanced to 26100.7623 and 26200.7623.
NVIDIA GeForce Game Ready Driver 591.86 (WHQL) was published late January 2026 and is part of the driver versions playing in this timeline.
Microsoft released the optional Preview update KB5074105 at the end of January 2026; its notes explicitly include a Display and Graphics fix for certain black‑screen scenarios.
Community‑reported directional FPS impacts cluster around 10–30% losses in affected benches; individual results vary dramatically by title and system configuration.

These facts were corroborated by vendor release notes and aggregated community/tech reporting during the incident.

The practical dilemma for gamers and admins

If you are a gamer, IT pro or system admin facing this situation, you have a hard tradeoff:

Keep KB5074109 installed and remain protected by the security content it contains, but risk encountering artifacts, black screens and performance regressions on certain machines.
Uninstall KB5074109 to restore (in many cases) normal gaming behavior — but doing so removes a security rollup and may expose the machine to addressed vulnerabilities. For enterprise environments, uninstalling a security update is not a light decision and must be coordinated with risk assessment and compensating controls.

There are additional operational complications:

Uninstall failure: several users report that attempting to rollback KB5074109 can fail with error 0x800f0905, a servicing stack / component‑store error that blocks the uninstall path and complicates remediation. That means some affected users cannot simply click “Uninstall updates” and leave it at that; they must resort to System Restore, DISM repairs, or a repair reinstall to regain a rollback path.
KB5074105 is optional: Microsoft’s preview patch must be manually applied (or pulled via Windows Update optional updates) and is not automatically installed for most consumers.
Driver interactions: not every NVIDIA driver behaves identically. Rolling back to a prior NVIDIA driver or performing a clean driver reinstall (using DDU) are additional levers that can improve or worsen behavior depending on the exact symptom.

Recommended troubleshooting and mitigation steps

Below is a prioritized sequence of steps for consumers and administrators encountering these symptoms. Use caution: uninstalling a security update reduces the system’s protection surface.

Immediate user checklist (short version)

If you are not yet impacted, consider pausing updates temporarily until vendors publish confirmed fixes.
If you are impacted by black screens: try applying the optional preview update KB5074105 first (if available to you).
If artifacts or FPS drops persist: try a clean GPU driver reinstall (DDU in Safe Mode followed by a fresh driver installation).
If problems remain and you are comfortable, consider uninstalling KB5074109 — but only as a last resort, and only after you understand the security implications.
If uninstall fails with 0x800f0905, use System Restore (if available) or the Windows “Fix problems using Windows Update” recovery option to repair and then reattempt rollback.

Detailed step sequence

Pause Windows Updates (to prevent automatic reinstallation)
Settings > Windows Update > Pause updates (choose the maximum pause period).
Try the optional preview (KB5074105)
Settings > Windows Update > Optional updates > Download & install (if KB5074105 appears).
Reboot and test graphics behavior.
Clean GPU driver reinstall
Download Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) and prepare a stable driver installer for rollback.
Boot to Safe Mode, run DDU to remove current GPU drivers.
Reboot to normal mode and install a known stable NVIDIA driver (or the latest hotfix if published).
Test for artifacts and performance.
If still affected — rollback KB5074109 (last resort)
Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates > select KB5074109 > Uninstall.
Reboot and test.
Immediately pause updates again to prevent reinstallation.
If uninstall fails (error 0x800f0905)
Try wusa command-line uninstall: open elevated Command Prompt and run: wusa /uninstall /kb:5074109
Run DISM to repair component store: DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
Use System Restore to revert to a point prior to January 13, 2026 (if a restore point exists).
As a last measure, use “Fix problems using Windows Update” or perform an in-place repair install (keeps files/apps).

What enterprise admins should consider

Use Group Policy or WSUS/Intune to block/revert the update by device group until a durable fix is available.
Consider applying Known Issue Rollback (KIR) guidance from Microsoft where published.
For critical user groups (e.g., creative or gaming labs), isolate affected machines and use controlled rollbacks with compensating detection and monitoring controls.

Reporting, telemetry and what to capture for support

Whether you intend to open a ticket with NVIDIA or Microsoft, collect the following to accelerate triage:

dxdiag log (run dxdiag, save all information).
Windows Event Viewer logs around the time of the artifact/black screen.
GPU driver version and date.
OS build and KB list (Settings > System > About; Settings > Windows Update > Update history).
Short video/gif demonstrating the artifact (capture with OBS or another recorder).
Repro steps: which title, map/level, settings and whether the issue is immediate or appears after extended play.

Submit those artifacts to the vendor forums, the Microsoft Feedback Hub, and NVIDIA’s Driver Feedback Forum. Community‑level reproducibility helps vendors move from anecdote to lab reproduction quickly.

Why this happened (technical analysis and likely causes)

We do not yet have a single root‑cause engineering analysis from either vendor that fully explains the artifact cases. However, the pattern of symptoms and the vendor/field evidence points to an OS‑to‑driver interaction:

KB5074109 includes changes in the display/graphics servicing stack or related components that change timing, memory ordering, or resource handling in surface/driver callback paths.
When a driver (or driver + game) exercises a particular code path that assumes pre‑existing OS behavior, a subtle timing or state difference can manifest as transient artifacts, driver resets or worse frame‑timing regressions.
The heterogeneity (not every machine is affected) implies dependence on GPU microarchitecture, driver version, secondary software (overlays, capture tools, third‑party color managers), or a combination of those.

Historically, similar incidents have played out where Microsoft servicing changes surface in combination with GPU driver schedules; remediation has come either from a driver hotfix or a follow‑up Windows update that restores compatibility for the affected driver code paths.

Risks and downsides of uninstalling KB5074109

Security exposure: KB5074109 is a security rollup. Uninstalling it removes fixes intended to address vulnerabilities. If you roll back, ensure you have compensating controls (firewall, up‑to‑date browser, limited admin privileges).
Uninstall failures: Some users encounter error 0x800f0905 preventing rollback, which can force more invasive repairs.
Enterprise policy conflicts: Corporate patch cycles and compliance frameworks may prohibit removing security updates without approval or compensating measures.
Partial fixes: KB5074105 (the optional preview) addresses some black‑screen variants but may not repair all artifacting; uninstalling KB5074109 may fix artifacts now but leave you without the security fixes that patch other, unrelated vulnerabilities.

What to expect next

NVIDIA is likely to produce either a narrow hotfix driver (a targeted Game Ready driver addressing the interaction) or to coordinate with Microsoft on a Windows-side remediation if the root cause sits in the OS change. Historically, this is the vendor playbook for driver/OS regressions.
Microsoft will continue to publish release previews and out‑of‑band fixes for high‑impact regressions. Expect a future cumulative or servicing stack update that either resolves the artifact cases or adjusts the servicing metadata so drivers can adapt smoothly.
In the short term, expect advice from both vendors to include: try KB5074105, use DDU + clean driver installs, collect logs, and — only if necessary — uninstall KB5074109 with awareness of security tradeoffs.

Final assessment and recommendations

The community pattern (rollback restores behavior for many) is a clear operational signal that something in the January cumulative changed behavior of the Windows display/graphics stack for certain driver configurations. That makes rollback an effective short‑term stopgap for affected gamers.
However, uninstalling a security update is not a sustainable, risk‑free path. The correct long‑term resolution should come from either a vendor driver hotfix or a Microsoft servicing patch that restores compatibility without removing security protections.
If you are a casual gamer and unaffected: pause updates for the next few weeks and monitor vendor channels for confirmed fixes; avoid installing optional drivers or patches unless they specifically list fixes you need.
If you are affected and must play now: try KB5074105 first, then clean DDU reinstall of an earlier stable driver; only uninstall KB5074109 if those steps fail and you accept the security tradeoffs. If you operate in an enterprise, coordinate with security and patch teams before rolling back.

This incident underlines a recurring truth in modern Windows servicing: the display stack sits at the intersection of OS, driver and application complexity. When a cumulative update alters the operating environment, graphical applications — particularly contemporary AAA titles with complex rendering pipelines — can be the first to expose fragile timing or state assumptions. Vendors are responding: NVIDIA is triaging and Microsoft has published targeted fixes for some cases. For most users, a cautious, evidence‑driven sequence of mitigations (optional preview, driver cleanup, rollback only as last resort) balances usability with security until a permanent fix is released.

Source: VideoCardz.com https://videocardz.com/newz/nvidia-...74109-to-gaming-artifacts-suggests-uninstall/

ChatGPT · Feb 5, 2026

Windows 11’s January cumulative update, KB5074109, has been linked to a wave of gaming instability on systems using NVIDIA GeForce GPUs — including measurable framerate drops, visible in‑game artifacts, and intermittent black screens — and NVIDIA has advised affected users that uninstalling KB5074109 appears to restore normal behavior while the company investigates.

Background / Overview

Microsoft published the January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 as KB5074109, which advanced consumer builds to OS versions 26100.7623 and 26200.7623 and bundled a large security and quality payload. The update was delivered as a routine Patch Tuesday rollup but included a Servicing Stack Update (SSU) and more than 100 security fixes, plus a handful of non‑security quality changes intended to address issues such as NPU battery drain.
Within days of wide deployment, community channels — GeForce forums, Reddit threads, Feedback Hub posts, and several enthusiast newsrooms — began to collect consistent reports from a subset of systems: sudden drops in average FPS, worse 1%/0.1% low frame times (which increase perceived micro‑stutter), transient or sustained graphical artifacts during motion, and short black‑screen episodes either at boot or while returning from games. Many of those reports were reproducible for affected users and, crucially, often disappeared after uninstalling KB5074109.
Microsoft has since shipped follow‑up packages, including an optional Release Preview update (KB5074105) that addresses certain black‑screen scenarios, and an out‑of‑band cumulative (KB5078127) to roll forward fixes for some post‑update regressions. NVIDIA has acknowledged the reports publicly and is conducting engineering triage; a community representative on the GeForce forums (identified as Manuel) advised that, in reproduced cases, uninstalling KB5074109 restored normal display behavior. That guidance is explicitly framed as a temporary workaround while vendors identify a durable mitigation.

What players and testers are reporting

Symptom profile

The complaints coalesce into three overlapping clusters:

Performance regressions: Average framerate drops commonly reported in the range of ~10–30% in affected titles and scenes, along with degraded 1%/0.1% lows that produce stuttering and reduced responsiveness. These numbers vary by GPU model, driver version, game engine, overlay/anti‑cheat interplay, and system configuration.
Visual corruption: Motion‑dependent artifacts such as rectilinear blocks, abnormal shadow banding, flicker, and tearing that are not generated by the game engine itself. These tend to appear during sustained rendering load and can force repeated driver resets.
Black screens and desktop anomalies: Two distinct behaviors have been described: (1) a boot‑time or sign‑in stall that leaves the display blank for several seconds to minutes before the desktop appears; and (2) brief black‑out flashes during normal use or when returning from games, sometimes with wallpaper reset to plain black until personalization is re‑applied. Microsoft’s optional preview (KB5074105) explicitly calls out a fix for isolated multi‑user black‑screen scenarios, which aligns with some user experiences but does not claim to address every reported artifact.

Scope and reproducibility

Not every GeForce system or title is affected. The issue behaves heterogeneously: most users report no change, many report a single symptom, and a smaller subset experiences the full suite (artifacts + black screens + FPS drops). Community reproductions indicate that the problem often maps to a specific combination of Windows build, GPU driver version, game engine workload, overlays or anti‑cheat, and firmware/BIOS settings. Importantly, multiple independent reports show that uninstalling KB5074109 restores previous performance and visual fidelity on many affected machines, which is why NVIDIA temporarily recommended that course in reproduced cases.

Vendor responses and the evolving mitigation story

NVIDIA

NVIDIA’s public stance is investigative and cautious. Engineers and community staff acknowledged the reports on the GeForce forums and said they were reproducing the behavior in lab conditions. In early triage the company’s forum staff noted cases where uninstalling KB5074109 restored normal behavior, and NVIDIA committed to continuing investigation and to producing a driver‑level hotfix if a driver mitigation proves feasible. NVIDIA also continues to advise standard triage steps: capture diagnostics (crash dumps, DxDiag, frametimes), try a clean DDU uninstall and reinstall of the GPU driver, and preserve logs for vendor triage.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s response followed its usual servicing playbook: publish the KB entry for KB5074109, acknowledge known issues, and then deliver a Release Preview/optional update (KB5074105) that addresses some black‑screen scenarios and other Explorer/start menu stability problems. The company also issued an out‑of‑band cumulative (KB5078127) to deliver targeted fixes for certain post‑update regressions. Microsoft’s documentation and follow‑ups emphasize that the January rollup contained numerous security fixes and servicing changes — which complicates wholesale rollbacks in enterprise environments — while providing mitigations like Known Issue Rollback (KIR) for managed fleets.

How vendors frame the risk

Both vendors have been careful not to assign definitive blame to one another. The public characterization has been an OS ↔ driver interaction: small changes in Windows servicing, timing, or the display stack can expose latent driver assumptions or race conditions that only become visible under certain game engine workloads. That collaborative triage is ongoing and will determine whether the fix is a targeted NVIDIA hotfix driver, a Microsoft servicing change, or a combination.

Technical analysis: why a cumulative update can break games

Modern PC gaming is a finely balanced choreography between the operating system’s presentation and scheduling subsystems, the Windows Display Driver Model (WDDM), GPU drivers, firmware, overlays, anti‑cheat middleware, and the game engines themselves. Even minor changes to timing, scheduler priorities, or presentation semantics in Windows can alter how and when GPU work is scheduled and presented, revealing race conditions or assumptions inside driver code paths.
Key technical vectors that plausibly explain the observed regressions:

Servicing Stack Update (SSU) and cumulative nature: The January rollup included an SSU alongside the LCU. SSUs modify the servicing behaviour of the platform and can change how rollbacks behave; they also alter the servicing state that a driver expects, which complicates reproductions and makes rollbacks less straightforward.
Timing and synchronization changes: Small scheduler or timing differences at the OS level can shift when GPU command submission and present calls occur. On GPUs, that can change frame pacing and 1% low behavior, manifesting as both raw FPS losses and worse frametime outliers.
Presentation/compositor interactions: Borderless and exclusive fullscreen modes interact differently with the Desktop Window Manager (DWM). If the update adjusted presentation semantics, a previously stable driver path could suddenly encounter an unexpected sequence of events leading to visual artifacts or driver resets.
Edge cases with overlays and anti‑cheat: Many multiplayer titles use overlays, telemetry hooks, or anti‑cheat drivers that inject into the rendering pipeline. Changes in OS behaviour can amplify latent incompatibilities between those stacks and GPU drivers, causing corruption that only appears in specific titles or scenes.
Driver version interplay: Some reports arose while users were on late‑January drivers (for example the 591.xx branch), which complicates attribution because both the OS update and driver updates were distributed in the same timeframe. Reproducing the exact combination — Windows build + driver + game + overlays — is essential for proper root cause analysis.

These technical factors explain why the impact is heterogeneous across machines and why vendor triage must be methodical: reproduce the faulty configuration, capture telemetry, and iterate with instrumented builds rather than relying on anecdote alone.

Practical, step‑by‑step triage for affected gamers

If you’re seeing artifacts, black screens, or big framerate drops after installing KB5074109, follow these prioritized actions. Each step is ordered to minimize risk and maximize diagnostic value.

Record baseline diagnostics before changing anything:
Capture an in‑game run with FRAPS/RTSS/PresentMon to log frametimes and FPS.
Save Windows Event Viewer logs, DxDiag output, and any driver crash dumps.
Take video evidence (phone capture) of visible artifacts.
Try a clean driver reinstall:
Use Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode to remove remnants of the current driver.
Install a known stable WHQL driver (or the latest Game Ready driver recommended by NVIDIA) and retest. Clean installs often neutralize corruption caused by driver/version skew.
Test Microsoft’s Release Preview (optional) update KB5074105:
If you are encountering black‑screen scenarios specifically, the optional KB5074105 includes a targeted fix for some isolated multi‑user black‑screen conditions and may resolve certain symptoms without a rollback. Pilot it first on the affected machine.
If problems persist and you need immediate relief, consider rolling back KB5074109 as a temporary mitigation — but only after careful risk assessment:
Create a full system image or at least a system restore point and ensure recovery media is available.
Navigate to Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates and remove KB5074109.
After rollback, re‑test the exact scenarios and preserve the before/after logs to share with NVIDIA or Microsoft. Many users reported recovery after rollback, but this reduces your patch coverage.
If you administer fleets or manage multiple machines, do not recommend wholesale uninstall to end users:
Use Known Issue Rollback (KIR) or Microsoft management tooling to stage mitigations.
Pilot fixes, collect telemetry, and coordinate with vendor support before wide deployment.
Engage vendors with high‑quality reproductions:
If you file a support case with NVIDIA or Microsoft, include Windows build number, driver version, GPU model, DxDiag, GPU crash dumps, frametime logs, and precise reproduction steps. This materially speeds engineering triage.

Security vs. usability: the trade‑offs explained

Uninstalling KB5074109 is an effective short‑term mitigation for many users, but it’s not a benign step. KB5074109 is a cumulative security rollup that includes fixes for more than 100 vulnerabilities and targeted quality improvements (for example, NPU battery drain behavior). Rolling back a security cumulative reduces your exposure to threats addressed by that update.
For individual gamers on isolated networks, the operational risk may be acceptable as a short‑term fix while waiting for a vendor patch. For enterprise environments, removing a security rollup is a high‑impact decision that should only be undertaken with compensating controls and in coordination with security teams. Microsoft’s KIR and targeted out‑of‑band updates exist precisely to avoid the need for dangerous ad‑hoc uninstalls on managed fleets.
Put simply: measure before you change, prefer driver clean installs and Microsoft’s optional fixes first, and treat rollback as a last‑resort, short‑term plan that must be reconciled with security posture.

Risk assessment and what could go wrong with aggressive rollback

Uninstall failures: SSUs and certain servicing operations can make rollbacks more complex; some users may need to use Windows Recovery environments if uninstall does not complete cleanly.
Increased security exposure: rolling back removes the cumulative’s vulnerability fixes and may restore surface that threat actors could exploit if left unmitigated.
Incomplete remediation: uninstalling KB5074109 may fix some graphical symptoms but could leave other post‑update regressions unresolved, especially if multiple fixes and SSU changes were applied together.
Reprovisioning pain: enterprise recovery scenarios can be time‑consuming and may require re‑imaging machines or re‑applying policies to return to a secure baseline. Use KIR and staged remediation where possible.

Timeline (concise) — key dates and artifacts

January 13, 2026 — Microsoft publishes KB5074109, moving Windows 11 consumer builds to 26100.7623 and 26200.7623.
Mid‑January 2026 — Community reports of artifacting, black screens, and FPS drops begin to cluster on enthusiast forums and Feedback Hub.
Late January 2026 — NVIDIA community staff respond publicly; NVIDIA releases Game Ready driver updates in the 591.xx branch; some forum guidance suggests uninstalling KB5074109 restores behavior in reproduced cases.
End of January 2026 — Microsoft publishes an optional Release Preview (KB5074105) that addresses certain black‑screen scenarios; Microsoft also issues follow‑on fixes and an out‑of‑band cumulative (KB5078127) for other regressions.

Bigger picture: why this matters for Windows servicing and gaming

This incident underlines a persistent tension in modern platform engineering: the necessary scale and reach of cumulative security updates versus the fragile interactions of a complex hardware and software ecosystem. Vendors must ship security patches to protect users, but those patches inevitably touch behavior and timing across kernel, boot, and presentation subsystems — the exact surfaces that GPU drivers and modern game engines rely upon.
Two constructive lessons emerge:

Better cross‑vendor pre‑release testing with vendor‑provided test cases for modern game engines, overlays, and anti‑cheat stacks could reduce the likelihood of regressions reaching broad audiences.
Faster, privacy‑preserving telemetry sharing and clearer escalation/rollback playbooks would shorten the time to mitigations and reduce pressure for consumers to uninstall security rollups as a first response.

Conclusion and recommendations

The KB5074109 episode is a reminder that Windows servicing at scale is a high‑stakes balancing act: necessary security work sometimes produces unintended regressions in complex ecosystems. NVIDIA’s temporary recommendation that some users uninstall KB5074109 reflects pragmatic triage based on reproducible community reports, not a final assignment of blame. Vendor investigations and coordinated fixes remain the right path forward.
If you are not seeing problems: remain patched. KB5074109 contains security fixes and many systems are unaffected. If you are seeing artifacts, black screens, or framerate regressions: measure and capture diagnostics, try a clean DDU driver reinstall first, test Microsoft’s optional KB5074105 where relevant, and only consider uninstalling KB5074109 as a well‑documented, last‑resort mitigation after imaging and backups. Administrators should prefer KIR and staged deployments to protect security posture across fleets.
Expect further vendor advisories and either a narrow NVIDIA hotfix driver or a Microsoft servicing refinement in the near term; the practical goal for players and IT teams is to preserve security while minimizing downtime until a durable, vendor‑validated patch arrives.

Source: Tom's Hardware Yet another Windows update is wreaking havoc on gaming rigs worldwide — Nvidia recommends uninstalling Windows 11 KB5074109 January update to prevent framerate drops and artifacting

ChatGPT · Feb 5, 2026

Windows 11’s January cumulative update is causing a fresh headache for PC gamers and enthusiasts: systems running Nvidia GeForce GPUs are reporting visible artifacts, flicker and measurable frame‑rate regressions that many users and Nvidia staff trace to KB5074109, Microsoft’s January 13, 2026 cumulative update. Early vendor triage, community testbeds and official release notes paint a picture of an update that solved a long list of issues but also introduced new, platform‑level hiccups — and for some GeForce configurations the fastest‑working mitigation reported to date is to uninstall the KB5074109 rollup.

Background / Overview

Microsoft shipped KB5074109 on January 13, 2026 as a combined Servicing Stack Update (SSU) and Latest Cumulative Update (LCU) for Windows 11 builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623. The package bundled more than a hundred security fixes plus a handful of non‑security quality changes (including fixes to NPU power behaviour), and it was intended to be the standard Patch Tuesday rollup for the month.
Within days community channels — Nvidia’s GeForce forums, Feedback Hub posts, Reddit threads and multiple independent lab testbeds — began to collect reports of three overlapping symptom clusters: short black screens or desktop wallpaper resets; visual corruption during motion (rectangular blocks, odd shadowing/banding); and performance regressions (average FPS drops with worsened 1%/0.1% lows that increase perceived stutter). The issue is heterogeneous: most systems are unaffected, but a non‑trivial subset of Nvidia configurations show reproducible failures that often disappear when the January rollup is removed.
Nvidia’s community team publicly acknowledged the reports and said engineers are investigating. A GeForce forum staffer, identified as Manuel, told users that removing KB5074109 appears to resolve artifact reports in reproduced cases — advice that many outlets and community posts later repeated. Microsoft has issued targeted out‑of‑band (OOB) fixes for several urgent January regressions, and it published an optional Release Preview cumulative (KB5074105) at the end of January that contains display‑related fixes, but the graphics complaints persist for some setups.

What users are seeing: symptoms and scope

Visual corruption and black screens

Multiple users reported short black‑screen flashes when returning from fullscreen games or when the desktop repaints. Others documented moving‑scene artifacts — blocks, banding, and strange shadows — that show up only in certain titles and only under load. These manifestations are especially visible in modern DX12 engines with high draw‑call rates and in scenes with lots of dynamic lighting. Community reproductions show the artefacts both in exclusive fullscreen and borderless windowed modes, which implies the issue interacts with the presentation stack rather than being purely a fullscreen‑mode quirk.

Measurable frame‑rate drops and micro‑stutter

Benchmarks and user posts cluster performance regressions around the order of magnitude many gamers dread: average FPS deltas of roughly 10–30% in affected scenes, with reported losses like “10–20 FPS” in some titles. Perhaps more damaging to the experience, users commonly report degraded 1%/0.1% low frame times (the “stutter” numbers) which make games feel less responsive even when average FPS isn’t catastrophic. Independent testbeds have observed similar directional effects in some configurations; because the effect is configuration dependent, the exact magnitude varies widely.

Other oddities: frame generation errors and shadow anomalies

Beyond FPS and black screens, threads contain reports of frame generation failures (where temporal upscaling/frame‑generation features misbehave), shadow artifacts, and tearing‑adjacent anomalies. These symptoms show strong correlation with particular driver branches (notably the 591.xx series around the late‑January Game Ready releases) and with the presence of certain overlays, anti‑cheat modules or firmware versions. That makes the bug matrix complex and harder to triage, because reproducing the failure reliably often depends on precise combinations of driver, firmware and software stack.

Vendor response and recommended mitigations

Nvidia: investigating and advising a temporary rollback

Nvidia’s community staff acknowledged the issue publicly and confirmed engineering triage is underway. In multiple forum responses an Nvidia representative (Manuel) told users that the only consistent way the company had seen to resolve the artefacts was to uninstall KB5074109, while the firm continued to investigate whether a driver hotfix could provide a safer, forward‑installed remedy. That guidance is framed as a temporary mitigation, not a final verdict on root cause.
If you’re experiencing clear, reproducible artifacts or large frame‑rate regressions, Nvidia’s community advice (and the community’s own experiments) suggests the following immediate steps:

Confirm the current OS build (Settings > System > About).
Check Update history in Settings > Windows Update > Update history to see if KB5074109 is installed.
If present and the issue reproduces, consider uninstalling KB5074109 from the Update history’s uninstall option — but be aware of the security trade‑offs discussed below.

Microsoft: follow the update trail and apply targeted OOB fixes

Microsoft’s support literature shows KB5074109 includes fixes and also documents multiple known issues that were tracked after January’s rollout. The company rolled out OOB fixes addressing several symptoms (e.g., Remote Desktop/Azure authentication failures and Secure Launch reboot loops), and it published an optional Release Preview cumulative (KB5074105) that explicitly mentions fixes for some black‑screen scenarios. Microsoft recommends applying the follow‑on fixes and checking the Windows release health dashboard for the latest status.
Microsoft’s official guidance for removing the LCU portion of a combined SSU+LCU package is more complex than a simple “uninstall” in some cases (because the SSU can persist), and enterprise admins should use DISM or appropriate servicing stack guidance when attempting a rollback. For consumer users, the Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates path is the documented route, but the company warns that not all components are always removable and that doing so reduces the patch level.

The trade‑off: stability vs. security

Uninstalling a cumulative security update is never a decision to be taken lightly. KB5074109 rolled up a large number of CVE fixes and included an SSU that changes servicing behaviour; rolling back that security rollup exposes a system to vulnerabilities the patch intended to fix. Yet, for some gamers and testbeds the performance and corruption regressions are severe enough to force that trade‑off. The right choice depends on threat model and use case:

Casual, offline gamers with limited exposure and a pressing need for performance may choose rollback as a stopgap.
Users on shared or enterprise networks, or those handling sensitive workloads, should prioritise staying patched and instead test other mitigations: driver DDU+clean install, installing Microsoft’s optional KB5074105 or subsequent fixes, or using a driver hotfix if and when Nvidia issues one.

Security‑minded steps to reduce exposure if you rollback:

Pause automatic updates immediately after uninstalling to avoid an automatic reinstall while you evaluate fixes.
Disconnect from untrusted networks when possible, and limit administrative exposure until the permanent fix is available.
Monitor Microsoft’s release health and Nvidia’s driver updates to reapply security updates once a patch addresses the regression.

Why did this happen? Technical hypotheses

At this stage, the most plausible hypotheses focus on how a large cumulative rollup can alter presentation timing, kernel scheduling, driver interactions, or device initialization paths — all areas that GPU drivers and modern render pipelines rely on.

SSU + LCU interactions: Combined SSU packages can change update installation order and low‑level servicing behaviour; those changes sometimes expose timing or race conditions in drivers that previously ran without issue. Where an SSU modifies the servicing stack, rollback semantics can be constrained and the update can leave persistent state that complicates debugging.
Presentation and composition surface changes: If the cumulative update modifies how the desktop compositor, DRM stacks or frame presentation APIs behave (even in small ways), workloads that push the driver and the display stack to their limits — e.g., DX12 games with heavy concurrency — may reveal previously latent bugs. That could explain the mix of black screens, artifacts and worsened 1% lows.
Driver + OS timing regressions: Drivers depend on predictable kernel and DPC timing for latency‑sensitive operations. If a cumulative update changes scheduling, power states (e.g., NPU or other co‑processor behaviour) or polling intervals, that timing variation alone can trigger driver edge cases that were unobservable before.

It’s important to stress these are working hypotheses; only a formal post‑mortem from Microsoft and Nvidia with kernel traces and repro cases will definitively show root cause. Until then the community’s rollback‑and‑test pattern remains the primary signal for mitigation.

Broader context: a string of Windows servicing regressions

This incident did not happen in isolation. Over the past year Windows updates have introduced a sequence of high‑impact regressions — from broken shutdown paths and recovery‑environment issues to connectivity failures and corrupted playback on certain media configurations. Microsoft responded several times with OOB patches and optional preview rollups, but the cumulative frequency of emergency fixes has prompted both user frustration and internal process scrutiny within Microsoft.
That pattern has driven a palpable change in engineering priorities: several reports indicate Microsoft engineers are now prioritising performance and stability over rapid feature rollouts, and the company has increased efforts to stabilize monthly releases. Whether the company’s heavier focus on generative AI features in Windows contributed to this sequence of regressions is a broader organizational question; correlation does not imply causation, but the combination of large code‑generation initiatives and an accelerated product roadmap raises legitimate governance and testing questions.

The AI angle: is “vibe coding” to blame?

Tech press and community commentary have homed in on Microsoft’s expanding use of AI in engineering: CEO Satya Nadella said in a high‑profile conversation that roughly 20–30% of code in some Microsoft repositories might be written by AI, a claim widely reported and discussed. That fact, combined with the rise of “vibe coding” — AI‑driven generation and assembly of code from high‑level prompts — has made some observers speculate about whether AI‑assisted development reduces code robustness in edge cases.
At this point there is no direct evidence that AI‑generated code is the proximate cause of KB5074109’s problems. Microsoft’s official release notes and the community‑level reproductions focus on systemic interactions between a large security rollup and device drivers, which is a classic class of OS/driver compatibility regression. That said, the broader shift to AI in software development does raise valid questions about testing, code review and QA pipelines when large language models are used to generate or suggest code. Until vendor post‑mortems tie AI usage directly to the bug chain, claims that “vibe coding” caused these regressions should be treated as hypothesis, not fact.
A separate claim attributed to Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott — that “vibe coding will account for nearly all software development by the end of the decade” — is echoed in some commentaries but is difficult to trace to a single definitive public quotation, and should be considered an interpretive paraphrase unless a primary source is supplied. We flag that as unverified in public records we examined.

Practical checklist for users experiencing GPU issues

If you suspect your Nvidia GPU is affected after January patching, the following ordered checklist balances mitigation, safety and expediency:

Confirm symptoms with a controlled test: run one or two known‑good benchmarks or reproducible game scenes and record FPS/1% lows.
Verify installed updates: Settings > Windows Update > Update history and note KB5074109 and any subsequent OOB patches.
Try driver housekeeping: perform a clean driver uninstall with DDU in safe mode and reinstall the latest GeForce Game Ready driver; retest. Many regressions are driver‑only and are fixed by a clean install.
If the artifact or FPS issue persists and reproduces reliably, try Microsoft’s optional Release Preview (KB5074105) or the latest OOB fixes and retest. These were explicitly released to address some display and reliability problems.
If all else fails and you accept the security trade‑off, consider uninstalling KB5074109 via Update history to confirm whether the rollback resolves the issue — only as a temporary measure and with updates paused until a safer fix is available. Document your steps and take backups.

If you work in IT or manage fleets, coordinate with security teams and use test rings before rolling back or applying patches. For enterprise environments, Microsoft’s guidance emphasizes using DISM and other managed servicing tools when dealing with SSU+LCU packages.

What to watch next: how vendors will fix this

The most desirable remediation path is straightforward: Microsoft or Nvidia (or both) release an update that removes the regression without stripping security protections. Possible outcomes to monitor over the next update cycle:

Nvidia issues a targeted driver hotfix that avoids the OS rollback and resolves timing/interaction issues for affected GPUs.
Microsoft ships a cumulative patch (expected in February or as an OOB update) that addresses the change in the presentation/servicing stack that triggered artefacts; Microsoft has already released optional previews addressing related black‑screen scenarios.
Coordinated mitigation: a joint statement and cumulative pair of fixes that close the loop on both driver and OS changes, accompanied by post‑mortems explaining root cause and test‑coverage gaps.

For now the safest path for most users is to keep an eye on Microsoft’s Windows release health dashboard and Nvidia’s official driver release notes, and to avoid knee‑jerk uninstalls unless you must — because the rollback removes security coverage.

Critical analysis: strengths, weaknesses and long‑term risks

Notable strengths in vendor handling

Rapid triage: Nvidia’s community team acknowledged the reports quickly and recommended a defensible temporary mitigation; Microsoft pushed multiple OOB updates to address high‑impact enterprise regressions. That response cadence reflects mature incident management under pressure.
Transparent rollup notes: Microsoft’s KB article for KB5074109 documented known issues and follow‑on workarounds, giving admins actionable guidance on the specific enterprise impacts.

Significant weaknesses and systemic risks

Quality regressions across monthly rollups: a rising cadence of critical follow‑ups suggests test coverage gaps for complex, real‑world hardware/driver interactions — the precise places where OS rollups must be exercised before wide release. That is a process problem: rollout pipelines must better replicate the messy heterogeneity of PC configurations.
The security/stability trade‑off gets harder: combined SSU+LCU packages simplify patching but make rollback semantics more complex. When a security LCU also causes regressions, the choice becomes an unpalatable trade‑off rather than a straightforward update decision. Enterprises and consumers need clearer, safer rollback paths or faster targeted fixes.
Overreliance on emergent engineering practices: if parts of modern development workflows increasingly rely on AI suggestions or automated code generation, vendors must invest heavily in robust testing and human review for infrastructure‑level changes. While the direct link between AI‑assisted coding and this specific regression is not proven, the shift toward AI‑augmented development demands stronger QA controls to prevent large‑scale regressions from slipping through. Flag this as a governance and toolchain risk to be managed.

Conclusion

The KB5074109 incident is a timely reminder of how fragile the intersection of OS servicing and device drivers can be. For a segment of Nvidia GeForce users the January 2026 Windows 11 rollup introduced visible artefacts and substantial FPS regressions that community testbeds and Nvidia staff have linked to the update; uninstalling KB5074109 restores many affected systems, but that step sacrifices security protections included in the rollup. Vendors have moved quickly — Nvidia to investigate and Microsoft to issue OOB fixes and preview updates — but a durable fix will require coordinated engineering, transparent post‑mortems and improved test coverage for the wide range of hardware configurations Windows must support.
If you’re seeing glitches, tread carefully: validate the issue, follow vendor guidance, and accept that an uninstall is a temporary mitigation with security trade‑offs. Watch for a coordinated fix in the next cumulative update or a driver hotfix from Nvidia — and if you manage multiple machines, test any rollback or patch in a controlled ring before broad deployment. The immediate pain may be solved by a patch in the coming weeks, but the episode leaves a lasting lesson: in a world where updates are large and complex, careful testing and conservative rollout strategies matter as much as ever.

Source: TechSpot Windows update woes continue, this time slowing down Nvidia GPUs

ChatGPT · Feb 6, 2026

Windows 11’s January cumulative update, KB5074109, has been tied to a wave of gaming regressions on systems running NVIDIA GeForce GPUs — including visible artifacting, short black‑screen flashes, and measurable frame‑rate drops — and NVIDIA has acknowledged the reports publicly while advising affected users that uninstalling KB5074109 currently appears to restore normal behavior in many reproduced cases.

Background / Overview

Microsoft shipped the January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 as KB5074109 (advancing consumer SKUs to OS builds 26200.7623 and 26100.7623). The update bundled more than a hundred security fixes and several non‑security quality changes, but within days community channels began to surface a cluster of regressions that affected a subset of systems. These included black screens at boot or when returning from full‑screen apps, application hangs (notably some Outlook Classic configurations), and, crucially for gamers, motion‑dependent visual corruption and frame‑rate degradation.
The pattern that drew attention was not isolated to one forum or one game: independent posts, bench logs, and newsrooms recorded similar symptoms across disparate systems and titles. Multsdeclines in affected scenarios and worse 1%/0.1% lows that translated to increased perceived stutter — often in workloads that stress modern DX12 engines and dynamic lighting. The directional consensus from community testbeds placed typical deltas in the range of roughly 10–30% FPS loss for impacted setups, though individual results vary widely by GPU model, driver version, game engine and system configuration.

What users are seeing: symptoms and scope

Visual corruption and artifacting

Playependent* artifacts that do not originate from the game engine — rectangular blocks, odd shadow banding, flicker and temporary tearing — most visible in open‑world and graphically intense scenes. These artifacts were reported in both exclusive fullscreen and borderless windowed modes, suggesting an interaction with the OS presentation/display stack rather than a single fullscreen‑mode quirk.

Black screens and display anomalies

Two black‑screen patterns appeared repeatedly:

A delayed desktop appearance after sign‑in or boot, sometimes lasting seconds to minutes and occasionally leaving a plain black wallpapen was toggled.
Short, transient blackouts while switching contexts (for example, returning from a game), sometimes accompanied by a driver reset or temporary loss of display output. Microsoft’s optional Release Preview update (KB5074105) specifically lists fixes for some black‑screen scenarios, but it does not claim to cure every reported symptom. (support.microsoft.com)

Performance drops and worsened frametime lows

Affected users and community benches reported average FPS losses and significantly degraded 1%/0.1% lows — the latter being the most noticeable for everyday play because they increase micro‑stutter and reduce perceived responsiveness. Multiple anecdotal tests reported losses described as “10–20 FPS” in demanding scenes, and some testers measured higher deltas in pathological cases. These effects were heterogeneous; many systems saw no change.

Vendor responses and current mitigation guidance

NVIDIA’s acknowledgement and advisory

NVIDIA’s community team publsurge of forum reports and said engineers were investigating. A GeForce forum representative (named Manuel in captured threads) advised that, in reproduced cases, uninstalling KB5074109 appears to restore normal visual behavior, and that NVIDIA would continue triage while exploring driver‑level mitigations. That guidance — effectively recommending removal of a Microsoft cumulative security update as a temporary workaround — reflects triage realities rather than a final assignment of blame.

Microsoft’s record and follow‑ups

Microsoft’s KB entry for KB5074109 confirms the update’s release date (January 13, 2026) and documents the build changes and known issues. In response to multiple post‑release regressions across subsystems, Microsoft pushed targeted out‑of‑band fixes for specific problems (for example, Remote Desktop/AVD sign‑in failures and shutdown regressions on particular SKUs). The company also released an optional Release Preview cumulative (KB5074105) at the end of January that contains fixes for certain black‑screen situations. Microsoft has advised administrators about Known Issue Rollback (KIR) and targeted mitigations for enterprise environm

Independent reporting and corroboration

Multiple independent outlets — Windows Central, Tom’s Hardware, Windows Latest and other enthusiast sites — reported the same correlation between KB5074109 and the gaming anomalies, and reproduced rollback cures in community testbeds. That cross‑publication agreement strengthened the credibility of the correlation even while leaving open the technical question of precise root cause.

Technical analysis: why a Windows rollup can causeern Windows display stack sits at the intersection of OS surface changes, user‑mode compositors (DWM), driver kernel‑mode stacks (WDDM/nvlddmkm), and complex user‑space components (game engines, overlays, anti‑cheat modules). A cumulative update that touches servicing stack, security posture, or DWM timing can inadvertently alter timing or state assumptions that drivers rely on. When a high‑performance renderer (GPU driver + game engine) expects a particular ordering of DMA fences, presentation timestamps, or power transitions, subtle platform shifts can reveal latent race conditions or untested code paths. The heterogeneity we see — some machines affected, others not — points to a complex interaction between:

OS changes in the update (servicing or presentation subsystems),
specific driver branches and their handling of state transitions, and
workload patterns (titles that stress draw‑call rates, dynamic lighting, or VRAM paging).

In short: the update likely didn’t “break all NVIDIA GPUs,” but it did change environmental variables enough to trigger failure modes in particu+ application combinations.

Risks, trade‑offs, and why uninstalling a security update is serious

Reverting a cumulative security update is a blunt instrument: it may remove the offending behavior, but it also re‑exposes a device to the vulnerabilities that the update patched. The January rollup fixed many security issues; Microsoft’s KB page and security baseline documents show the update carried important fixes. Before recommending widespread uninstalls, vendors and administrators must weigh the immediate usability gain against the security cost and the operational burden of maintaining a deviated patch posture.
For enterprise fleets, the right approach is staged:

Test mitigations in a representative pilot ring.
Use Known Issue Rollback (KIR) or Group Policy mitigations where available.
Coordinate with security/patch teams before uninstalling any LCU (Latest Cumulative Update).

For individual gamers, the calculus may differ: a workstation used primarily for gaming might temporarily prioritize usability, but users should understand the security trade‑off and appls (network isolation, limited privilege accounts, or scheduling a rapid reinstall of the security patch once a fix is available).

Practical troubleshooting checklist (evidence‑driven triage)

If you suspect your NVIDIA GPU started showing artifacting or FPS drops after installing KB5074109, follow a careful, documented process. The goal is to collect reproducible evidence and choose the least invasive mitigation that resolves your symptoms.

Capture evidence
Record in‑game frametimes and FPS (use built‑in benches, FRAPS, PresentMon, or in‑game counters).
Take short video clips of the artifacting or black screens.
Save Event Viewer logs and any nvlddmkm or TDR (Timeout Detection and Recovery) crash dumps.
Try driver housekeeping
Update to the latest WHQL Game Ready driver from NVIDIA and test.
If problems persist, pe uninstall using Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in safe mode, then reinstall the latest stable driver. Many community tests found driver cleanup helpful before attempting rollbacks.
Test Microsoft’s optional preview (KB5074105)
If your system shows black‑screen symptoms, test the Release Preview optional cumulative (KB5074105) in a controlled way — pilot it first on a non‑production machine. Microsoft documented targeted fixes in that optional release for specific black‑screen scenarios.
Rollback as a last resort
If you have a reproducible artifact or FPS regression and the previous steps fail, consider uninstalling KB5074109 temporarily only after creating a full image backup, system restore point, and ensuriatest security updates later.
Document the rollback, preserve logs, and be prepared to reapply security patches when a vendor‑validated fix is published. NVIDIA’s interim guidance to uninstall the January LCU reflects triage realities but is explicitly temporary.

Step‑by‑step: how to uninstall KB5074109 safely (high‑level)

Create a full system backup or disk image- Note current OS build and driver versions, and copy any relevant crash dumps to an external location.
Use Settings > Windows Update > Update history > Uninstall updates to remove KB5074109, or run an elevated DISM / Windows Update command if UI removal fails.
Reboot and re‑test the problematic workloads.
If uninstall succeeds and symptoms disappear, keep the system offline or limit exposure until a coordinated fix is available, or apply compensating mitigations.

Caveat: uninstalling an LCU can be straightforward on many machines, but in some cases rollback can fail or leave the OS in a non‑bootable state. Th and images are essential. Community threads include examples where users needed recovery media to restore machines after attempted rollbacks.

What to expect from vendors and a likely timeline

NVIDIA: continued triage and the possibility of a narrow hotfix driver if engineers can reproduce the root cause in driver code. A driver patch would be the cleanest fix because it restores security posture while addressing driver behavior. NVIDIA’s public staff confirmationsctively investigating.
Microsoft: incremental servicing changes, known‑issue rollbacks and preview/patch updates (such as KB5074105) addressing discrete problems. Microsoft has already issued out‑of‑band updates foessions and continues to refine the servicing payload based on telemetry and partner reports.
Coordinated fix: the most durable outcome would be either a targeted Microsoft servicing refinement or an NVIDIA driver update that neutralizes the incompatibility without requiring security rollbacks. Until then, expect vendor advisories and community test reports to guide interim choices.

Critical appraisal: strengths, weaknesses and what this incident reveals

Strengths (what went right)

Rapid commu enthusiast forums, bench logs and social posts quickly aggregated reproducible symptoms that enabled vendors to triage.
Vendor engagement: NVIDIA publicly acknowledged the issue and advised mitigations; Microsoft responded with targeted out‑of‑band fixes and a Release Preview rollup that addressed some black‑screen scenarios.
Actionable interim mitigations: the combination of driver cleanup, optional preview testing, and targeted uninstalls provided users with immediate steps to recover functionality when necessary.

Weaknesses and risks

Security vs. stability tradeoff: recommending uninstall of a cumulative security update is fraught; it forces users to choose betweey and exposure to patched vulnerabilities. This is particularly concerning for devices used in mixed or enterprise contexts.
Incomplete vendor coordination:and NVIDIA responded, some users perceived slow, piecemeal mitigation and inconsistent messaging across official channels and community forums.
Heterogeneous impact: because the problem affects only a subset of configurations, it’s harder for vendors to prioritize and reproduce, which prolongs time to a durable fix.

Recommendations for players, power users and IT admins

Players and enthusiasts:
Collect evidence (framerate logs, videos) before making system changes.
Try updating or clean‑reinstalling GPU drivers first.
Test Microsoft’s optional Release Preview (KB5074105) if youen symptoms; pilot it on a non‑critical machine.
If rollback is required, back up first and accept the security trade‑off only temporarily.
Power users and small businesses:
Consider running a parallel, patched test machine to validate fixes before mass deployment.
Use DDU for driver cleanups when investigating visual corruption.
If you must uninstall KB5074109, reintroduce compensating controls (network segmentation, limited privilege accounts) and plan to reapply security updates when a vendor fix is available.
Enterprise admins:
Prefer staged rollouts, Known Issue Rollback (KIR), andons over blanket uninstalls.
Coordinate with security and desktop teams before deviating from the standard servicing baseline.
Collect diagnostics centrally and open vendor cases to speed triage and aggregation of reproducible logs.

Final takeaways

The evidence gathered across community reproductions, vendor forum posts and independent reporting shows a credible correlation between Windows 11’s January cumulative (KB5074109) and a set of graphics‑related regressions on some NVIDIA GeForce systems. NVIDIA has acknowledged the issue and indicated that uninstalling KB5074109 restored normal behavior in reproduced cases while engineers investigate. Microsoft has published targeted follow‑ups and an optional Release Preview that addresses certain black‑screen scenarios, and both vendors continue to triage.
That combination — a security update that introduces user‑facing regressions in a subset of real‑world configurations — is a reminder that modern OS servicing happens at the intersection of complex components. Until a coordinated, vendor‑validated fix arrives, follow an evidence‑driven mitigation path: collect logs, try driver housekeeping and preview updates first, and treat uninstalls of security LCUs as a temporary, well‑documented last resort. The ideal outcome is a narrow driver or servicing patch that restores both security and graphics stability without forcing users into a binary choice between the two.

Source: XDA Nvidia confirms that the Windows 11 January update causes frame drops and artifacting

ChatGPT · Feb 6, 2026

The January Windows 11 cumulative—KB5074109—has left a clear trail of disruption for a subset of users, with Nvidia GeForce owners reporting serious gaming slowdowns, visual corruption, and black screens, and Nvidia engineers advising affected players to temporarily uninstall the update while the company investigates.

Background / Overview

KB5074109 was released as Microsoft’s January 2026 Patch Tuesday cumulative for Windows 11 (affecting 24H2 and 25H2), and it is large in scope: the update packages fixes for 114 security vulnerabilities, three zero‑day issues among them, plus a set of quality improvements intended to resolve battery drain on devices with NPUs and to refresh Secure Boot certificate handling. For most users, the update will install automatically unless Windows Update is paused.
Despite those security priorities, the rollout has not been smooth. In the days after KB5074109 began appearing on consumer and managed devices, reports surfaced across forums, Reddit, and multiple news outlets describing (a) measurable framerate drops in gaming sessions on machines using Nvidia GPUs, (b) transient artifacting and screen blanking while gaming, and (c) boot or lock‑screen black screens for a smaller subset of users. Independent newsrooms and community threads show consistent patterns that implicate an interaction between the update’s changes and Nvidia’s graphics stack.

What users are seeing: symptoms and scale

Primary symptoms

Sustained FPS drops — Multiple community benchmarks and anecdotal reports describe average framerate losses on the order of roughly 15–20 FPS in many titles; some test benches and forum posts describe performance regressions in the 10–30% range depending on resolution, GPU model, and game settings.
Visual artifacts and stuttering — Rectangular corruption, banding, and transient tearing have been observed during gameplay, particularly in GPU‑heavy scenes. These are often tied to the nvlddmkm driver stack in Event Viewer entries.
Random black screens — Users report black screens that either require a reboot or resolve after a brief display blackout. Some black‑screen variants occur at boot/login; others happen mid‑session. Microsoft has acknowledged certain black‑screen scenarios and issued optional follow‑up patches aimed at isolated cases.

Which hardware is affected?

The pattern of reports indicates the problems are predominantly affecting systems with Nvidia GeForce GPUs. Across the affected threads and news coverage, AMD Radeon and Intel Arc owners are not showing the same breadth of issues, which strongly suggests a compatibility regression specific to Nvidia’s driver interaction with changes introduced by KB5074109 rather than a universal Windows graphics subsystem failure. That said, absence of large‑scale AMD reports does not rule out isolated AMD issues.

Drivers: red herrings and confounders

Community troubleshooting initially targeted Nvidia drivers because driver updates and a Windows LCU (latest cumulative update) arrived in close proximity. Nvidia pushed multiple driver updates in late January (including security‑focused branches and newer Game‑Ready packages), and some users noted driver‑related black screens even before rolling forward to the latest driver. Nevertheless, multiple affected users and Nvidia staff observed that uninstalling KB5074109 often restored previous performance even without rolling drivers back, which shifted the focus back onto the Windows update as the proximate trigger.

Nvidia’s public posture and recommended workaround

On the GeForce community forums an Nvidia representative (username Manuel) wrote that the company is investigating the issue and that, in practice, the only reliable remedy known so far is to uninstall KB5074109. Nvidia’s engineering staff emphasized the recommendation as a temporary workaround rather than a permanent solution, pending root‑cause analysis and cooperation with Microsoft. Several reputable outlets quoted that post and community threads where rollbacks restored gaming behaviour.
Microsoft, for its part, has acknowledged multiple problems arising from the January update (including boot issues in some configurations) and published guidance for recovery. The company also released an optional preview update (KB5074105) that addresses some black‑screen and sign‑in problems in specific, isolated multi‑user or enterprise scenarios; KB5074105 is not a general antidote for all gaming performance regressions and itself produced mixed feedback among users who installed it.

Why this likely happened: technical analysis

At this stage the evidence points to a compatibility regression — an unintended interaction between KB5074109 and Nvidia’s Windows driver stack — rather than a malicious change or deliberate performance throttle. Several plausible technical paths explain how that could occur:

Windows LCUs modify or harden core components used by GPU drivers, like Desktop Window Manager (DWM), display driver interfaces (DxGk, D3DKMT), or related kernel components. A fix intended to close an information‑disclosure vector in DWM or to adjust Secure Boot/bootloader handling could indirectly affect memory layout, synchronization, or pathing used by the GPU driver, exposing a latent assumption or race in nvlddmkm.sys. KB5074109 explicitly addressed DWM information disclosure in one of the zero‑day patches.
Changes that affect power management on NPU or SoC platforms can also alter device idle/resume behaviour and timing. Graphics drivers are sensitive to timing and power‑state transitions; a shifted power signature could increase latency or trigger error paths. KB5074109 included battery/NPU fixes that change sleep/idle behaviour on certain machines.
Complex, platform‑specific bugs — for example, interactions with Secure Launch or multi‑GPU/multi‑monitor configurations — can produce intermittent artifacting and black screens only on some OEM BIOS/driver combinations. Community reports show disproportionate impacts with certain motherboard vendors and laptops, suggesting a hardware/firmware dimension.

This combination of DWM, power management, and platform diversity makes it plausible that a cumulative update designed to patch dozens of components could expose an Nvidia‑specific fragility. Confirming the precise root cause requires vendor cooperation: Windows kernel trace logs, driver crash dumps, and controlled regressions on Nvidia’s test matrix.

The tradeoff: security vs. usability

Uninstalling a cumulative security update is a meaningful decision: KB5074109 patches 114 vulnerabilities, including actively exploited flaws, and refreshes critical certificates tied to Secure Boot. For users who rely on data security, enterprise compliance, or exposure‑sensitive work, keeping the LCU is a high priority. Microsoft labels the January bundle mandatory for defense of the platform.
On the other hand, for gamers and creators who rely on stable, high‑performance GPU output and who have already tested that rolling back KB5074109 restores usable performance, the pragmatic calculus is different. A temporary uninstall — coupled with careful mitigation steps (pause updates, block reinstallation, and maintain strict web hygiene) — can be justified for dedicated gaming rigs where uptime and consistent frame rates are essential.
Key points to weigh:

Security risk: removing a patch that addresses actively exploited vulnerabilities increases exposure, particularly on systems that are used for web browsing, downloading, or connecting to untrusted networks.
Operational risk: for users whose system became unstable or fails to boot with KB5074109, the update itself is an operational problem that must be addressed immediately (and uninstallation is the first known practical remedy in many reported cases).
Reinstallation risk: if you uninstall without pausing Windows Update, the cumulative will likely reapply automatically; a controlled pause is necessary to wait for a tested fix from Microsoft or Nvidia.

How to determine if KB5074109 is installed on your machine

Open Settings → Windows Update → Update history. The installed cumulative updates are listed there; KB5074109 will appear with its KB number and install date. This is the recommended first check for most users.
If Windows will not boot, you can still verify installed updates from the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) Command Prompt by using DISM to enumerate packages, though that is an advanced step. Microsoft documents how to inspect and remove packages via DISM if the graphical path is unavailable.

Safe rollback: step‑by‑step options (with caveats)

Below are practical, validated methods for removing KB5074109. Follow the option that matches your comfort level and system state. If you are not confident, create a backup image before proceeding, and ensure you have a recovery plan (USB Windows install media, BitLocker recovery key).

Option A — Uninstall from Settings (desktop accessible)

Open Settings → Windows Update → Update history.
Under Related settings, select Uninstall updates (this launches the Control Panel view for installed Windows updates).
Find KB5074109 in the list, select it, and choose Uninstall. Restart when prompted.

Notes: Some updates cannot be uninstalled from the UI. If the Uninstall button is missing, use Option B or C.

Option B — Uninstall from Windows Recovery Environment (if Windows won’t boot)

Force WinRE by powering on and interrupting the boot three times (hold the power button during the Windows logo). Windows should enter Automatic Repair and then Advanced options.
Choose Troubleshoot → Advanced options → Uninstall Updates. Select Uninstall latest quality update to remove the LCU (e.g., KB5074109). Reboot and test.

Notes and caveats:

If your system drive is protected by BitLocker, you will need the recovery key to proceed. Have that key available before attempting WinRE repairs.
If Uninstall Updates fails or is missing, you can open Command Prompt in WinRE and use DISM to remove the package, but DISM commands and package names are advanced; follow Microsoft guidance or consult support.

Option C — Command line uninstall (advanced)

As administrator in a working Windows environment or from WinRE Command Prompt:

Attempt to remove the update with wusa:
wusa /uninstall /kb:5074109 /quiet /norestart
(This invokes the Windows Update Standalone Installer to uninstall the package.)
If wusa returns error codes (e.g., 0x800f0905), you may need to use DISM to list packages and remove the specific LCU package name:
DISM /online /get-packages
DISM /online /remove-package /packagenameackage_for_Rollup~~~~0.0.0.0

Important: Removing an LCU that includes an SSU (servicing stack update) or when the package is combined may not be possible with wusa; Microsoft’s KB text for preview updates warns that combined SSU+LCU packages cannot be removed with wusa and require DISM/Remove‑Package. Exercise caution and record the package name exactly.

After rollback: pause updates and block immediate reinstallation

Go to Settings → Windows Update → Pause updates and pause for the maximum period available (typically several weeks).
Optionally toggle “Get the latest updates as soon as they are available” off if you enabled it for preview releases. This prevents immediate re‑pushing of optional or preview hotfixes until Microsoft releases a tested fix.

If uninstall fails or recovery is incomplete

Use System Restore if you have a restore point prior to the update. System Restore can return registry and system files without touching personal data.
If the machine still will not boot, use WinRE to Reset this PC (Keep my files) as a last‑resort non‑destructive remedy; this reinstalls Windows while preserving user data but will remove installed apps. Always back up first where possible.

Enterprise guidance and management considerations

For IT administrators and managed estates, the KB5074109 incident illustrates key operational needs:

Use a rolling pilot ring and deploy cumulative updates to a subset of devices before broad rollout. Telemetry from the pilot can detect regressions early.
Maintain Quick Machine Recovery or system image backups for critical endpoints; ensure BitLocker keys and AD/Azure AD recovery mechanisms are accessible if recovery is required.
Test critical vendor drivers (GPU, storage, network) against mass updates in controlled lab environments that replicate real‑world hardware mixes. Nvidia’s and Microsoft’s coordination on root cause analysis is central to a fast, safe fix.

What we recommend right now

If you are a casual user and your PC shows no gaming or stability issues, keep KB5074109 installed. The security patches are meaningful and protect against actively exploited vulnerabilities.
If you are experiencing clear, reproducible GPU performance degradation, artifacting, or black screens that correlate with the KB5074109 install date, consider a targeted rollback using the procedures above. After rollback, immediately pause updates while you wait for a tested fix from Microsoft or an Nvidia hotfix driver.
If rollback is not possible from Settings and WinRE uninstall fails, collect diagnostic artifacts (Event Viewer logs, nvlddmkm crash dumps, Windows Reliability Monitor entries) and open a ticket with Nvidia support and Microsoft support. Provide timestamps and exact build numbers to accelerate triage.

What Nvidia and Microsoft need to do (and why their cooperation matters)

Shared telemetry and crash dumps. Nvidia needs full kernel‑mode crash dumps and driver telemetry from affected devices; Microsoft must provide kernel and DWM trace data under coordinated engineering NDAs where appropriate. This is the fastest path to an engineered mitigation that does not weaken security posture.
Driver hotfixes vs. Windows fixes. If the root cause resides in Nvidia driver assumptions about Windows internals, Nvidia should publish a targeted hotfix driver quickly. If the cause is a Windows regression, Microsoft should prioritize a limited LCU correction that preserves the security footprint. In many past incidents, a combined driver and OS micro‑patch approach produced the cleanest outcome.
Improved QA for mixed hardware configurations. The modern PC ecosystem is vast; both vendors should increase testing coverage for common OEM BIOS/driver combinations and make compatibility guidance explicit in the Windows release health dashboard.

Broader implications for Windows updates and platform reliability

The KB5074109 episode is the latest example of the fragile balance between urgent security patching and system reliability. When updates fix critical vulnerabilities — especially zero‑days in core components — the urgency to deploy is real. But the breadth of modern PC hardware and the variety of driver vendor assumptions mean that even well‑intentioned fixes can produce broad user impact.
For end users this highlights two practical, recurring lessons:

Maintain backups and enable restore features before mass updates. A little prep goes a long way when recovery is needed.
Delay non‑urgent updates on production machines until the first post‑release week unless the update addresses an actively exploited zero‑day that affects your threat profile. Pilots and staggered rollouts remain the safest strategy.

For vendors, the episode underlines that transparency, rapid telemetry sharing, and coordinated hotfixes reduce user harm and restore trust faster than silence or partial acknowledgments.

Final assessment and what to watch next

KB5074109 fixes a significant catalog of vulnerabilities and includes quality updates that matter for many devices, but the real‑world impact for some Nvidia GeForce users has been material and measurable. Nvidia’s public stance — recommending uninstall for affected gamers — makes sense as an emergency, stopgap measure for systems where the update created an unusable state. At the same time, removing a security LCU carries nontrivial risk, so it should be a considered, temporary step rather than a default.
What to monitor in the coming days:

Nvidia hotfix driver releases and official engineering updates indicating a fix for the nvlddmkm / driver interaction.
Microsoft’s successor cumulative/preview updates clarifying which subcomponent triggered the regression and whether a narrow LCU replacement will be pushed. Watch for official KB notes and guidance about safe rollback paths.
Community verification across multiple hardware combinations to confirm whether fixes are robust and not just masking the problem for a subset of configurations. Independent benches will be important for confidence.

If you or your organization are affected, collect logs, follow the rollback steps only if you understand the tradeoffs, and pause updates until a tested remediation is available. The combined priorities of security and reliability can be reconciled, but only through transparent vendor coordination and careful, measured recovery processes.

Source: Tbreak Media Windows 11 KB5074109 breaks Nvidia gaming: fix | tbreak

ChatGPT · Feb 6, 2026

NVIDIA has confirmed it is investigating a wave of gaming problems that began after Microsoft’s January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 (KB5074109), as users report intermittent black screens, visual artifacts, and measurable frame‑rate drops when playing graphically demanding titles. The pattern is striking: in many reproducible cases, uninstalling KB5074109 restores prior behavior, and Microsoft’s optional follow‑up preview update (KB5074105) appears to address some—but not all—of the symptoms. For gamers and IT professionals this creates a painful trade‑off between security and stability, and it spotlights lingering fragility at the intersection of OS servicing and GPU driver ecosystems.

Background

What KB5074109 changed

KB5074109 is the January 13, 2026 cumulative update for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 that moves affected systems to OS builds 26100.7623 and 26200.7623. The package was released as a security and quality rollup containing more than 100 security fixes and several platform changes intended to address issues such as NPU power behavior, Secure Boot certificate handling, and legacy modem driver removal.
Shortly after the update’s rollout, multiple user communities began reporting a cluster of display‑related symptoms that coalesced around systems running NVIDIA GeForce GPUs. While the update clearly delivered important security content, a subset of devices started showing problems ranging from transient black‑outs to visible in‑game artifacting and stuttering.

Timeline — how we got here

January 13, 2026: Microsoft publishes KB5074109 (Builds 26100.7623 / 26200.7623).
Mid‑January 2026: Community reports surface describing black screens, graphical artifacts, app hangs (notably Outlook POP configurations), and boot failures on some commercial devices.
Late January 2026: Microsoft issues targeted mitigations and a Release Preview optional cumulative (KB5074105) that includes a Display & Graphics fix for isolated black‑screen scenarios.
Late January — early February 2026: NVIDIA staff in its community forums acknowledges the issue and reports that uninstalling KB5074109 resolves visual artifacts in several reproduced cases while NVIDIA engineers continue triage.

Multiple independent newsrooms, forum threads, and lab repro attempts have now reported similar directional findings: KB5074109 correlates strongly with the display regressions seen on numerous NVIDIA‑equipped machines, and rollback often restores normal behavior.

What gamers are seeing

Symptom clusters

Reports and test reproductions collected across vendor forums, social communities, and independent testbeds break down into three principal symptom clusters:

Intermittent black screens and wallpaper resets. Two variants appear: (1) a delayed or blacked‑out desktop during boot/logon that resolves after seconds or requires recovery, and (2) short black‑out flashes during gameplay or when returning from an exclusive fullscreen session. In some cases, the desktop wallpaper is reset to a plain black background until personalization is reapplied.
Visual artifacts in motion. Videos and screenshots shared by players show rectilinear blocks, shadow banding, and transient pixel corruption that occur during motion-heavy scenes in modern titles (Forza Horizon 5 and other large‑scale, GPU‑stressful games have been singled out). These artifacts sometimes cause the GPU driver to reset or call for a system reboot.
Measurable frame‑rate degradation and stutter. Benchmarks from community members and labs show average FPS drops in affected scenarios (directionally reported between roughly 10–30% in worst cases), with degraded 1%/0.1% lows—resulting in increased stutter and a worse competitive experience for latency‑sensitive players.

Scope and variability

Not every system is affected. The incident is heterogeneous: it appears in specific combinations of Windows build, GPU driver version, game engine stress patterns, monitor connection types (DisplayPort vs HDMI have been mentioned), and even per‑system firmware settings. Some affected users are on recent GeForce drivers in the 591.xx series; others see issues on older drivers. AMD users report far fewer occurrences in comparison, though there are scattered reports across vendors in edge cases.

NVIDIA’s response and the community fallback

NVIDIA’s community staff publicly acknowledged the reports and said engineering teams were investigating. A GeForce forum representative noted that, in cases reproducing artifacts and black screens, uninstalling KB5074109 frequently restored normal behavior. NVIDIA also indicated that Microsoft’s optional preview update (KB5074105) contains a Display & Graphics fix that helps some black‑screen scenarios—particularly those that occur in isolated multi‑user or upgrade contexts—but that artifacts and FPS regressions remain a separate, unresolved vector in some workloads.
That public acknowledgement and the recommendation to roll back a Microsoft security update generated controversy—because asking users to remove a security rollup is a last‑resort workaround with real risk implications. NVIDIA framed the advice narrowly: engineering was triaging, rollback was a practical immediate mitigation in reproducible cases, and installing Microsoft’s follow‑up preview (where appropriate) could resolve certain black‑screen symptoms without removing security updates. Nonetheless, the practical reality for many gamers has been a tense choice between “play now” and “stay patched.”

Microsoft’s mitigations and patches

Microsoft’s published support notes for KB5074109 confirm the update’s rollout and list a number of known issues and fixes. In response to post‑deployment complaints, Microsoft published targeted out‑of‑band fixes for some enterprise scenarios (for example, Remote Desktop/Azure Virtual Desktop sign‑in) and an optional Release Preview cumulative (KB5074105) with a Display & Graphics entry described as: “Fixed: This update addresses black screen issues in isolated multiuser environments, typically after a Windows upgrade.”
Early testing indicates KB5074105 reduces certain black‑screen instances for some users, but it does not categorically resolve the in‑game artifacting and FPS regressions reported by NVIDIA communities. Microsoft has also acknowledged a separate boot failure symptom (UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME) affecting a small subset of devices, primarily non‑consumer commercial machines already in a fragile update state.

Why this happened: technical analysis

Patch surface and OS‑driver interaction

Large cumulative updates like KB5074109 touch kernel and display‑related subsystems, driver entitlement mechanisms, and platform services such as Secure Boot and NPU power management. Even well‑tested patches produce edge‑case interactions when they meet the enormous diversity of PC hardware, driver implementations, firmware configurations, and pumped game engines.
GPU drivers implement deep integration with the OS presentation pipeline, kernel memory handling, and device timing. Small changes to driver‑facing timeouts, page‑fault handling, or the order of driver binding during boot can destabilize driver state machines in specific workloads. When those changes collide with specific driver versions, GPU architectures, or monitor path configurations (DisplayPort MST, dynamic HDR modes, or DP version negotiation), transient black screens and visual corruption can result.

Why NVIDIA’s recommendation to uninstall makes sense (technically)

When a rollback consistently restores system behavior across independent reproductions, the most parsimonious explanation is that the update changed the OS‑side behavior drivers depend on (timing, IOCTL semantics, kernel scheduling). From an engineering triage perspective, uninstalling the update is a strong way to confirm causality: if the problem disappears, the OS change is the likely root cause or a contributing factor.
However, that logic does not assign blame in a vacuum. It only establishes correlation and a rapid mitigation that buys time while vendors work on safer, permanent fixes.

Risks and trade‑offs

Security vs. stability

Uninstalling KB5074109 removes a security rollup that patches more than a hundred vulnerabilities. For consumer users in a home network behind a router and modern antimalware protections, the incremental risk depends on the threat model; for enterprise devices connected to broader networks or with regulatory requirements, uninstalling security updates is frequently unacceptable.

System integrity and recovery

Some users attempting to uninstall KB5074109 reported servicing errors, rollbacks that failed, or even systems that required WinRE interventions. For machines already in an inconsistent state—or running older firmware or drivers—a rollback may be nontrivial and could lead to additional downtime.

Operational complexity for admins

IT administrators must weigh compensating controls (network UTM, segmented access, restricted application sets) against the operational impact of a security rollback. For managed fleets, manufacturers and Microsoft usually coordinate a staged mitigation that minimizes exposure while broader fixes are developed.

Practical guidance — what to do now

Below are measured, practical steps for gamers, power users, and IT teams to address the issue safely.

For individual gamers (consumer / enthusiast)

Diagnose: Confirm your Windows build (Settings → System → About) to check whether KB5074109 is installed.
Try Microsoft’s Preview fix first: If you are comfortable with optional preview updates, install KB5074105 or take the Release Preview channel guidance—this can resolve some black‑screen cases without removing security content.
Update GPU drivers: Clean‑install the latest GeForce Game Ready or Studio driver. If issues started after a driver update, try rolling back to a previously stable driver version.
If problems persist and you are willing to accept security trade‑offs, test uninstalling KB5074109 as a diagnostic step:
Uninstall via Settings → Windows Update → Update history → Uninstall updates.
If uninstall fails, use WinRE (or Safe Mode + administrative tools). Document the process and ensure you can reapply the update later.
Pause updates: If uninstalling fixes the issue, pause Windows Updates temporarily to avoid automatic reinstallation while vendors release definitive fixes.
Use DDU for driver cleanup: If you choose to reinstall drivers, use Display Driver Uninstaller (DDU) in Safe Mode for a clean driver install.
Backup and recovery: Before major changes, create a restore point or full system image. If you’re unsure, seek help from a knowledgeable friend or a professional.

For IT administrators and enterprise teams

Don’t roll back in mass without risk assessment. Determine whether affected machines are in a security‑sensitive environment.
Prioritize deployments: Delay KB5074109 on critical systems until vendor fixes are validated in your environment.
Use WSUS / Group Policy / Update rings to control distribution. Block or defer the specific KB on managed endpoints while monitoring vendor advisories.
Apply compensating controls: tighten network rules, enable host‑based protections, and segment vulnerable systems from critical infrastructure.
Test KB5074105 and vendor driver updates in a controlled lab before broad rollout.
Coordinate with OEMs and Microsoft Support for machines that fail to boot or cannot uninstall the update cleanly.

What vendors should do (and what they’re already doing)

Microsoft needs to continue fast triage and provide clear guidance for both consumer and enterprise scenarios. Their Release Preview and targeted fixes are useful but insufficient until artifacts and all gaming regressions are addressed.
NVIDIA should aim to reproduce the issue in controlled labs across driver branches and provide driver hotfixes that target the interaction with the updated OS display stack—without compromising performance or feature support.
OEMs and motherboard vendors should verify firmware/BIOS interactions (DisplayPort handling, UEFI updates) and publish recommended BIOS/firmware versions where necessary.
Coordination: the incident underlines the need for tighter, faster cross‑vendor triage: reproducible test artifacts, shared debug logs and kernel traces, and prompt public advisories that balance urgency and nuance.

Why this matters: systemic implications

The incident is a reminder that the modern PC platform is an ecosystem of tightly coupled components. Patches that touch low‑level plumbing inevitably run the risk of uncovering fragile edge cases.
Cumulative updates that bundle security fixes and quality changes complicate root‑cause analysis; rolled‑out fixes are necessary, but the more bundled the patch, the greater the chance of collateral effects.
For gamers, the event makes clear how critical predictable OS and driver interactions are to a consistent experience. A single Windows service change can reduce playability for competitive and immersive titles.
For enterprises, the situation shows how patching policy must be balanced with operational resilience; rigid “patch immediately” policies can cause operational headaches when updates interact poorly with specific hardware or enterprise software.

Critical appraisal — strengths and weaknesses of the response so far

Strengths

Vendors moved rapidly: Microsoft published a Release Preview update (KB5074105) and a series of targeted mitigations; NVIDIA publicly acknowledged community reports and began investigation rather than dismissing user feedback.
Community reproducibility: forum threads, video evidence, and independent benches made the problem visible and actionable quickly, enabling vendor triage.
Practical mitigations exist: for many affected users, rollback and driver adjustments are realistic, immediate fixes that restore playability.

Weaknesses and risks

Communication: early messaging had gaps. Users needed to piece together advice across vendor forums, tech news sites, and Microsoft support pages instead of receiving a single, clear advisory.
Security trade‑offs: recommending uninstall of a security update is a blunt instrument. It’s necessary at times for diagnostics, but it places users in a difficult decision point without easy guidance on compensating controls.
Partial fixes: the Release Preview update addresses some black‑screen cases but does not appear to resolve all in‑game artifacting or measurable FPS regressions. Until both OS and driver vendors complete coordinated fixes, some configurations will remain affected.
Testing and rollout model: this incident highlights an ongoing tension in Microsoft’s cumulative update model and in GPU vendors’ driver cadence. Faster, more granular preview testing by a broader hardware cross‑section could reduce the surface area for such regressions.

Final recommendations (clear, actionable)

If you are experiencing black screens or artifacts and are a consumer gamer:
Try KB5074105 (preview) first.
Clean‑install the GPU driver with DDU and try a prior stable driver if problems began after a driver update.
If you must remove KB5074109, do so as a test and pause updates afterward. Restore the update after a vendor hotfix is available.
Back up before you touch updates or drivers.
If you manage corporate fleets:
Freeze KB5074109 on critical systems until validated.
Test KB5074105 and the latest GPU drivers in a lab.
Implement compensating controls if you must suspend the patch on a subset of systems.
Engage your OEM support and Microsoft support channels if you see boot failures or servicing errors.
For tech vendors and platform engineers:
Prioritize reproducible telemetry and share sanitized logs between Microsoft, GPU vendors, and OEMs to accelerate root‑cause analysis.
Consider more granular update constructs or clearer guidance when security updates contain platform behavior changes.
Improve early access testing coverage across popular GPU/monitor/driver permutations.

The KB5074109 incident is not a one‑off glitch; it’s an instructive case study in how modern update engineering interacts with an extremely heterogeneous PC ecosystem. For now, practical mitigations exist—KB5074105 for some black‑screen cases, driver rollbacks, and uninstalling the rollup as a last‑resort diagnostic step—but the durable fix will require coordinated patches from Microsoft, NVIDIA, and OEM partners plus careful validation across real world configurations. Gamers should avoid panic, document their systems, and prioritize safety: test the preview fix, use clean driver installs, and only consider removing a security update if they understand the trade‑offs and have a plan to re‑secure the machine once a permanent fix lands.
Conclusion: this episode underscores a simple truth for end users and IT teams alike—patches matter, but so does the orchestration that delivers them. Until the vendors close the loop, the cleanest short‑term strategy is a cautious, measured approach: try Microsoft’s preview fix, keep drivers tidy, avoid wholesale rollbacks at scale, and monitor vendor advisories closely.

Source: www.guru3d.com https://www.guru3d.com/story/nvidia...-11-kb5074109-as-gamers-report-black-screens/

Navigation section

NVIDIA Probes Windows 11 KB5074109 Issues: Black Screens, Artifacts, FPS Drops

What users are reporting: black screens, artifacts, and FPS drops​

Black screen and wallpaper reset reports​

Artifacts in games (rectangles, shadowing)​

Measurable frame‑rate regressions​

Timeline and vendor responses​

Verifying the technical facts​

Technical analysis: why a cumulative update can break games​

What NVIDIA’s involvement means (and what it doesn’t)​

Practical and IT pros should do now​

Strengths, weaknesses and wider implications​

Strengths of the response so far​

Risks and unresolved weaknesses​

Red flags and unverifiable claims​

How this episode should change update hygiene going forward​

Bottom line for Windows gamers (practical, prioritized)​

AI

Background​

What users are seeing right now​

How NVIDIA responded​

Why an OS update can suddenly break games​

Precedent: the October KB5066835 incident​

Verified technical facts and numbers​

Practical advice for gamers and IT managers​

Weighing the trade‑offs: security vs. usability​

Critical analysis: what this episode exposes about ecosystem coordination​

Bottom line and expectations​

AI

Background​

What users are seeing: symptoms and scope​

Visual corruption and flicker​

Black screens at boot or during use​

FPS drops and stutter​

Heterogeneous impact​

What NVIDIA and Microsoft have said (and not said)​

Technical analysis: plausible causes and mechanisms​

How to verify and collect evidence (for advanced users and IT teams)​

Short‑term mitigation and remediation options​

Guidance for gamers and enthusiasts: immediate checklist​

Risks and tradeoffs​

Why this matters: system integrity and vendor coordination​

What to watch next​

Recommendations for IT administrators​

Final analysis: where responsibility and remediation intersect​

AI

Background and overview​

What users are seeing: symptoms, scope and reproducibility​

Black screens and desktop resets​

Visual corruption and flicker in games​

Timeline of vendor responses and mitigations​

Why a cumulative Windows update can break games: the technical mechanics​

Precedent: why this is not unprecedented — the October 2025 case​

What NVIDIA has said — and what it hasn’t​

Microsoft’s mitigation options and enterprise controls​

Practical guidance for gamers and administrators​

For gamers (prioritized)​

For IT administrators and enterprise​

Critical analysis: strengths, weaknesses and risk assessment​

Strengths in the current response​

Weaknesses and systemic risks​

Longer‑term lessons and recommendations for Microsoft, NVIDIA and the ecosystem​

Final verdict: what to expect next​

Quick checklist: what to do if you’re experiencing problems now​

AI

Background: what changed in January’s Windows 11 update​

What users reported — symptoms, scope and early signals​

NVIDIA’s response: triage, admission and the controversial workaround​

How we know this isn’t just one-off noise: independent reporting and evidence​

The technical picture — plausible mechanisms and limits of current evidence​

Previous precedents: this pattern has happened before​

Why rollback is not a harmless fix — security and stability tradeoffs​

Practical, step‑by‑step guidance for affected gamers​

The vendor coordination problem — why this keeps recurring​

What NVIDIA and Microsoft should — and probably will — do next​

Critical analysis — strengths, weaknesses and risks in the current handling​

Final recommendations for gamers, system builders and IT teams​

AI

Background / Overview​

What users are seeing (the symptom set)​

What users are reporting: black screens, artifacts, and FPS drops

Black screen and wallpaper reset reports

Artifacts in games (rectangles, shadowing)

Measurable frame‑rate regressions

Timeline and vendor responses

Verifying the technical facts

Technical analysis: why a cumulative update can break games

What NVIDIA’s involvement means (and what it doesn’t)

Practical and IT pros should do now

Strengths, weaknesses and wider implications

Strengths of the response so far

Risks and unresolved weaknesses

Red flags and unverifiable claims

How this episode should change update hygiene going forward

Bottom line for Windows gamers (practical, prioritized)

Background

What users are seeing right now

How NVIDIA responded

Why an OS update can suddenly break games

Precedent: the October KB5066835 incident

Verified technical facts and numbers

Practical advice for gamers and IT managers

Weighing the trade‑offs: security vs. usability

Critical analysis: what this episode exposes about ecosystem coordination

Bottom line and expectations

Background

What users are seeing: symptoms and scope

Visual corruption and flicker

Black screens at boot or during use

FPS drops and stutter

Heterogeneous impact

What NVIDIA and Microsoft have said (and not said)

Technical analysis: plausible causes and mechanisms

How to verify and collect evidence (for advanced users and IT teams)

Short‑term mitigation and remediation options

Guidance for gamers and enthusiasts: immediate checklist

Risks and tradeoffs

Why this matters: system integrity and vendor coordination

What to watch next

Recommendations for IT administrators

Final analysis: where responsibility and remediation intersect

Background and overview

What users are seeing: symptoms, scope and reproducibility

Black screens and desktop resets

Visual corruption and flicker in games

Timeline of vendor responses and mitigations

Why a cumulative Windows update can break games: the technical mechanics

Precedent: why this is not unprecedented — the October 2025 case

What NVIDIA has said — and what it hasn’t

Microsoft’s mitigation options and enterprise controls

Practical guidance for gamers and administrators

For gamers (prioritized)

For IT administrators and enterprise

Critical analysis: strengths, weaknesses and risk assessment

Strengths in the current response

Weaknesses and systemic risks

Longer‑term lessons and recommendations for Microsoft, NVIDIA and the ecosystem

Final verdict: what to expect next

Quick checklist: what to do if you’re experiencing problems now

Background: what changed in January’s Windows 11 update

What users reported — symptoms, scope and early signals

NVIDIA’s response: triage, admission and the controversial workaround

How we know this isn’t just one-off noise: independent reporting and evidence

The technical picture — plausible mechanisms and limits of current evidence

Previous precedents: this pattern has happened before

Why rollback is not a harmless fix — security and stability tradeoffs

Practical, step‑by‑step guidance for affected gamers

The vendor coordination problem — why this keeps recurring

What NVIDIA and Microsoft should — and probably will — do next

Critical analysis — strengths, weaknesses and risks in the current handling

Final recommendations for gamers, system builders and IT teams

Background / Overview

What users are seeing (the symptom set)

Black screens and wallpaper resets

Visual corruption in motion

Performance regression and micro‑stutter

Why a cumulative update can surface these problems (technical mechanics)

Vendor responses so far

Nvidia

Independent press and community editors