Third time's hopefully the charm as Nvidia releases hotfix driver to … — and more

Gamers have been really enjoying Resident Evil Requiem—assuming they've been able to get the game running well. And unfortunately, Nvidia seems to have made that pretty difficult for at least some PC gamers, as there are reports that path tracing, in particular, has been causing a bit of a frame rate headache on recent drivers. Thankfully, it looks like Nvidia has now pushed out an official fix.

The fix in question comes in the form of hotfix driver 595.76, which, amongst other things, Nvidia says should lead to "improved path tracing performance in Resident Evil Requiem." The previous 'fix', at least according to some facing issues, was to simply roll back your driver, but it never feels great having to do that.

Although our own recent testing showed little performance hit when swapping between Nvidia drivers, it's hard to deny there has been an issue for some. Well, I suppose it's actually impossible to deny now there's this hotfix.

These recent driver shenanigans, by the way, are following previous driver shenanigans to the tune of the Hokey Pokey, where Nvidia temporarily rolled back its 595.59 driver after it was causing problems such as with fan control. Then the next driver, 595.71, started to cause GPU voltage issues for some gamers.

This hotfix also claims to address GPU voltages becoming capped when the graphics card is overclocked. Given some gamers experiencing issues with low frame rates had also seen lower power draw than on rolled-back drivers, there's a chance that this could be relevant to the Resident Evil Requiem problems, too.

Nvidia does note that "the safest option is to wait for the next WHQL certified driver" because "these Hotfix drivers are beta, optional and provided as-is" and "are run through a much abbreviated QA process."

However, in my experience, hotfix drivers tend to be completely fine, and are worth installing if they're solving a problem specific to you—in this case, if you're getting poor performance in Resident Evil Requiem with path tracing enabled. Nvidia's warning is well worth keeping in mind, though, as there isn't the same guarantee as with a main driver release.