NVIDIA recently released the latest graphics card driver 576.02, which aims to solve the common bricking problem and other serious faults of RTX GPUs, such as black screen and freezing. Since the release of the 572.xx version driver, many GeForce RTX series graphics cards have frequently encountered various bugs, and the 576.02 driver not only fixed most of the problems, but also brought about performance optimization.
According to actual measurements by players, the RTX 50 series graphics cards benefit the most from this driver update, especially in terms of power consumption. The power consumption in idle mode is significantly reduced. In the previous driver version, the RTX 5070 idle frequency was about 180 MHz, while under the new driver 576.02, this value drops to just 22 MHz. The power consumption of RTX 5060Ti in idle mode has also been greatly improved, only 7W.
In addition, the performance improvement of RTX 5080 is particularly significant. One user reported that in the 3DMark Steel Nomad test, the 576.02 driver improved its score by about 4.3% (from 8832 points to 9215 points). Another user said that he achieved a performance improvement of up to 7.5% (from 8400 points to 9033 points) in the same test.
Similar performance was seen in actual game testing. For example, in "Marvel Contest", after using the new driver with the RTX 5080 equipped with Ryzen 7 9800X3D, the frame rate increased from 140+fps to 150+fps, with a performance gain of about 5-7%.
On the Reddit forum, other RTX 50 series graphics card users (including the RTX 5070 series) also reported similar performance improvements. Surprisingly, some RTX 40 series users also reported a 3-4% performance improvement.
Therefore, this seems to be more of a driver issue, with previous versions limiting the performance of the RTX graphics card. Some users also mentioned that the new driver unlocks higher graphics memory frequencies, resulting in more performance improvements, but requires manual overclocking of the graphics memory to achieve this. In general, the 576.02 driver shows the level that NVIDIA graphics card drivers should have.