There’s a moment in every gamer’s or creator’s life where the cold certainty of a hardware bug trumps the thrill of eye-watering benchmark numbers. Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series launch was supposed to herald the age of unapologetic graphical excess, propelling polygon counts and AI-assisted wonders into unheard-of territory. But if you’ve found yourself with one of these powerhouse cards and Windows 11 24H2, chances are you’re more preoccupied with fighting gremlins than frame rates. And for many, the latest Nvidia driver patch feels less like a solution and more like an elaborate prank.
You might assume that Nvidia, given its trillion-dollar status and GPU world dominance, would have the release of its RTX 5000 series down to a science. Yet, this generation’s debut has been anything but smooth. Misleading marketing claims? Check. Reports of burnt and melted power connectors, worthy of a “GPU Cooks Itself!” meme? Double check. Add to the list a spectacular parade of display issues—the kind of problems that can make a multi-thousand dollar investment morph into a very expensive dust collector.
Nvidia’s army of engineers has certainly been kept busy. Driver update after update has attempted to mop up the lingering issues, most recently with the release of version 576.02. For users eager (or desperate) to upgrade to Windows 11 24H2, the changelog offered a sliver of hope: general stability improvements, black screen fixes, a less crash-prone existence in the pixel trenches. But, as so often happens in the world of PC hardware, fixing one thing breaks another.
The issue isn’t limited by flagship elitism, either. Users of the 5080 and 5070, as well as plenty on the RTX 40-series and good old 30-series, discovered their temperature sensors stuck in Groundhog Day mode after installing the 576.02 driver. The experience, as chronicled across forums and comment threads, is as perplexing as it is universal: Boot the PC, see a perfectly chilled idle temp, then realize your fans never ramp up because, as far as third-party monitoring tools know, your GPU doesn’t have a pulse.
It’s only a proper reboot, a true cast-off-the-shackles restart, that freshens things up. Ironically, the new, ultra-slick Nvidia hardware has been brought down by the very convenience features its user base has come to expect—and which are now helping to propagate this subtle, but crucial, bug.
In extreme cases, this could edge closer to causing thermal throttling—where your expensive RTX 5090 runs slower than anticipated, just to avoid melting itself to the motherboard. And nobody splashes out on a flagship GPU to underperform or, worse, fry.
For those with elaborate cooling setups—custom loops, AIOs, triple-fan monstrosities—the inability to rely on automatic temperature feedback elevates the humble reboot from annoyance to a daily ritual. Others simply rolled back their drivers, with a resigned shrug reminiscent of early-aughts problem-solving: “If it ain’t broke, don’t update it.”
This go-around is especially embarrassing for Nvidia, given its claims that the RTX 5000 series would deliver “next-generation stability” alongside unrivaled performance. Customers were meant to be basking in the glory of photorealism, not conducting forced restarts and poring over forum threads in search of basic thermal hygiene.
It’s almost poetic. The more ambitious and integrated the platform, the more likely it is that minor bugs have huge downstream consequences. Here, it’s simply a heat sensor—a single data pipe—that sends custom cooling, monitoring overlays, and power management up in flames.
But these programs can only function as well as the data they’re fed. The current bug means that, while Nvidia’s own overlay can still see what’s actually happening, the public API that third-party utilities plug into serves one, lone, ice-cold reading. As a result, those tools, unable to detect rising temps, can’t command fans to kick in. Anyone relying on these to tune their noise level or keep components healthy is left stranded in a sea of uncertainty.
If Nvidia’s hardware is going to live at the bleeding edge, its software needs to keep pace, not limp behind. Current events starkly highlight how a single, seemingly-minor driver slip can render even the most lavish engineering moot. For all Nvidia’s talk of AI-assisted workflows and ray-tracing nirvana, temperature management remains quite literally at the heart of a stable, performant system.
The more risk averse have rolled back to previous drivers, shrugging off the possibility of missing out on supposedly critical stability enhancements for the comfort of a working temperature readout. On the fringes, some stick stubbornly to Nvidia’s overlay for monitoring, living dangerously without the safety net of automated fan curve management.
It’s a DIY spirit, but in this context, less “hacker cool” and more “well, this’ll have to do until headquarters gets it together.”
As is so often the case, the community is left in a holding pattern: watching for a hotfix, debating in endless forum threads, and wondering how a company so technologically advanced could miss such a basic detail.
If history is any indication, Nvidia’s engineers are hard at work dissecting the quirk and preparing a fix. The company typically responds to these situations with a mix of understated patches and verbose, PR-friendly explanations. But until the next driver drops, customers are left in the lurch.
We expect perfection. What we often get is carefully managed chaos.
It’s a reminder: the difference between dream and disaster can be measured in mere degrees Celsius. And, for now, it’s up to the passionate, resourceful community to bridge that gap—rebooting, rolling back, and raising a ruckus until Big Green ships a fix.
As hardware and software continue their arms race, today’s bugs will become tomorrow’s “Remember when?” war stories. In the meantime, trust your instincts, check your fans manually—and keep one eye on the forums. There’s nothing quite as unifying, or as ironically chill, as troubleshooting GPUs at the very edge of progress.
Source: Neowin Nvidia fixes Windows 11 24H2 driver issues but completely breaks GPU temperature reading
The RTX 5000 Series: A Rocky Redefinition
You might assume that Nvidia, given its trillion-dollar status and GPU world dominance, would have the release of its RTX 5000 series down to a science. Yet, this generation’s debut has been anything but smooth. Misleading marketing claims? Check. Reports of burnt and melted power connectors, worthy of a “GPU Cooks Itself!” meme? Double check. Add to the list a spectacular parade of display issues—the kind of problems that can make a multi-thousand dollar investment morph into a very expensive dust collector.Nvidia’s army of engineers has certainly been kept busy. Driver update after update has attempted to mop up the lingering issues, most recently with the release of version 576.02. For users eager (or desperate) to upgrade to Windows 11 24H2, the changelog offered a sliver of hope: general stability improvements, black screen fixes, a less crash-prone existence in the pixel trenches. But, as so often happens in the world of PC hardware, fixing one thing breaks another.
A New Bug Is Born: The GPU Temperature Reading Snafu
If your upgrade ritual includes keenly monitoring every degree Celsius your graphics card emits, you may have noticed a new, colder reality. No matter how intense your idle, plasma cannon firefights, or Blender encodings, the Nvidia App’s GPU temperature readout sits stubbornly at one unyielding number. Is your RTX 5090 really living its best life at 25°C? Unlikely, unless you’ve stuck it in a cryogenics lab.The issue isn’t limited by flagship elitism, either. Users of the 5080 and 5070, as well as plenty on the RTX 40-series and good old 30-series, discovered their temperature sensors stuck in Groundhog Day mode after installing the 576.02 driver. The experience, as chronicled across forums and comment threads, is as perplexing as it is universal: Boot the PC, see a perfectly chilled idle temp, then realize your fans never ramp up because, as far as third-party monitoring tools know, your GPU doesn’t have a pulse.
The Fast Boot Trap: Windows Modernity Bites Back
Nvidia isn’t solely to blame for this digital cold shoulder. Some of the blame falls at the feet of modern Windows. Shutting down your PC from the usual Windows menu might not really “shut it down”—not if Fast Boot is enabled (and on most systems, it is by default). Fast Boot, designed to speed up startup by caching certain aspects of system state, means you’re not getting a clean slate when you power up. For driver issues like this, that shortcut turns into a booby trap: your GPU’s temp data gets stuck at the number it booted with, and not even a “shut-down” can shake it loose.It’s only a proper reboot, a true cast-off-the-shackles restart, that freshens things up. Ironically, the new, ultra-slick Nvidia hardware has been brought down by the very convenience features its user base has come to expect—and which are now helping to propagate this subtle, but crucial, bug.
Downwind Disasters: Why the Temp Bug Matters
At the surface, a stuck temperature sensor is little more than a comic inconvenience. But dig one millimeter deeper, and it’s a potential hardware time bomb. Motherboard BIOSes, fan controllers, and tools like Afterburner or FanControl rely on that temperature data to decide how aggressively to spin up cooling systems. If your GPU thinks it’s at a perpetual idle, the fans lounge about, your card gets hotter than a July sidewalk, and thermals spike without warning.In extreme cases, this could edge closer to causing thermal throttling—where your expensive RTX 5090 runs slower than anticipated, just to avoid melting itself to the motherboard. And nobody splashes out on a flagship GPU to underperform or, worse, fry.
User Frustration Boils Over
The blowback has been swift and, for Nvidia, deeply unflattering. GeForce forums and Reddit threads read like a fever dream. One user on the GeForce forum describes, “When I turn on PC all my temperature programs is on 25 degrees. I need to restart PC and this is fixed…” Another points out that Nvidia’s in-house overlay does report the correct temperature, but third-party apps grab the same stuck value, utterly bamboozling any custom fan curves you might have set up.For those with elaborate cooling setups—custom loops, AIOs, triple-fan monstrosities—the inability to rely on automatic temperature feedback elevates the humble reboot from annoyance to a daily ritual. Others simply rolled back their drivers, with a resigned shrug reminiscent of early-aughts problem-solving: “If it ain’t broke, don’t update it.”
A Pattern of Driver Drama
If you feel like deja vu is kicking in, you’re not wrong. Nvidia’s driver woes aren’t new. Just a few weeks ago, game developers themselves publicly advised users to roll back their drivers after particularly egregious issues left popular titles unplayable for certain setups. For every juicy patch note promising stability or performance improvements lurked a fresh, undetected quirk.This go-around is especially embarrassing for Nvidia, given its claims that the RTX 5000 series would deliver “next-generation stability” alongside unrivaled performance. Customers were meant to be basking in the glory of photorealism, not conducting forced restarts and poring over forum threads in search of basic thermal hygiene.
The Window(s) of Problems Past
Some veterans of the Windows platform—those who lived through the tumultuous transitions from Windows Vista, to 8, to 10—find a certain grim amusement in the current predicament. Windows 11 24H2 represents Microsoft’s latest attempt to unify, simplify, and modernize the OS experience. But just as often, sweeping under-the-hood changes break long-standing hardware assumptions, leaving companies like Nvidia scrambling.It’s almost poetic. The more ambitious and integrated the platform, the more likely it is that minor bugs have huge downstream consequences. Here, it’s simply a heat sensor—a single data pipe—that sends custom cooling, monitoring overlays, and power management up in flames.
Third-Party Monitoring: Friend and Foe
Programs like MSI Afterburner and FanControl have long offered enthusiasts finer control than what GeForce Experience or Nvidia’s Control Panel ever dreamed of. Fan curves, undervolting, on-the-fly monitoring—these are the secret sauce behind every “my card runs fifteen degrees cooler!” brag in the community.But these programs can only function as well as the data they’re fed. The current bug means that, while Nvidia’s own overlay can still see what’s actually happening, the public API that third-party utilities plug into serves one, lone, ice-cold reading. As a result, those tools, unable to detect rising temps, can’t command fans to kick in. Anyone relying on these to tune their noise level or keep components healthy is left stranded in a sea of uncertainty.
Meltdown Memories: Power and Thermals in the Spotlight
This whole debacle arrives on the heels of a wider hardware debate: the explosive power requirements and thermal envelopes of new GPUs. The RTX 5000 series pushed further than ever, demanding beefier power supplies, robust cooling solutions, and—according to some unfortunate buyers—connectors that don’t burst into flames.If Nvidia’s hardware is going to live at the bleeding edge, its software needs to keep pace, not limp behind. Current events starkly highlight how a single, seemingly-minor driver slip can render even the most lavish engineering moot. For all Nvidia’s talk of AI-assisted workflows and ray-tracing nirvana, temperature management remains quite literally at the heart of a stable, performant system.
User Workarounds: Reboots, Rollbacks, and Wishful Thinking
Given Nvidia’s acknowledgment (or lack thereof) of the temperature issue, the community has responded with customary ingenuity. Power user threads are awash with guides on how to properly “reboot” versus “shut down” in Windows 11, and how to toggle off Fast Boot for a slightly less cursed experience. “Restart your PC—no, not that way, the real way!” has become the day’s rallying cry.The more risk averse have rolled back to previous drivers, shrugging off the possibility of missing out on supposedly critical stability enhancements for the comfort of a working temperature readout. On the fringes, some stick stubbornly to Nvidia’s overlay for monitoring, living dangerously without the safety net of automated fan curve management.
It’s a DIY spirit, but in this context, less “hacker cool” and more “well, this’ll have to do until headquarters gets it together.”
Where’s Nvidia?
As always, the question on everyone’s lips is: What is Nvidia going to do about this? For now, the official channels—from the company’s release notes to forum interventions—have remained silent on the temperature sensor bug, focusing instead on the broader stability improvements their latest drivers were supposed to deliver.As is so often the case, the community is left in a holding pattern: watching for a hotfix, debating in endless forum threads, and wondering how a company so technologically advanced could miss such a basic detail.
If history is any indication, Nvidia’s engineers are hard at work dissecting the quirk and preparing a fix. The company typically responds to these situations with a mix of understated patches and verbose, PR-friendly explanations. But until the next driver drops, customers are left in the lurch.
The Big Picture: Fragility at the Cutting Edge
When scrutinized under the fluorescent glare of 2024’s tech landscape, the saga of Nvidia’s graphics drivers and Windows 11 24H2 offers a cautionary tale about the fragility of the ultra-connected, ultra-complex hardware ecosystems we take for granted. Enthusiasts, gamers, and professionals can assemble blisteringly powerful rigs, tricked out with AI coprocessors and terrabytes of ultra-fast storage, only to be waylaid by a bug that makes their system forget how hot it is.We expect perfection. What we often get is carefully managed chaos.
It’s a reminder: the difference between dream and disaster can be measured in mere degrees Celsius. And, for now, it’s up to the passionate, resourceful community to bridge that gap—rebooting, rolling back, and raising a ruckus until Big Green ships a fix.
Final Thoughts: Stay Cool, Stay Patient
So if you’re sitting there, RTX 5090 humming gently, with a temperature readout that’s eerily static, resist the urge to panic. Roll back if you must, reboot if you can, and rest assured: you’re not alone on this frosty frontier.As hardware and software continue their arms race, today’s bugs will become tomorrow’s “Remember when?” war stories. In the meantime, trust your instincts, check your fans manually—and keep one eye on the forums. There’s nothing quite as unifying, or as ironically chill, as troubleshooting GPUs at the very edge of progress.
Source: Neowin Nvidia fixes Windows 11 24H2 driver issues but completely breaks GPU temperature reading
