Latest GeForce Driver Fixes VR HMD Black Screen...Maybe

Nvidia today released a new GeForce Game Ready driver that includes game optimizations for Sea of Thieves as well asAnsel and Nvidia Highlights support for a handful of games. Nvidia also said the new driver fixes a black screen issue in VR headsets, but Redditors beg to differ.

Nvidia has a knack for having updated drivers ready when big games hit the market. Today’s big game release is Rare’s first-person multiplayer action-adventure pirate game, Sea of Thieves, and Nvidia is on the ball again with a new driver to coincide with the launch. If you plan to play Sea of Thieves--and judging by the game’s crashed website, there’s probably a lot of you--you should probably install GeForce Game Ready Driver 391.24 – WHQL for the optimal experience.

Along with the new driver, Nvidia released version 3.13.1 of GeForce Experience, which enables feature updates for a handful of games. Call of Duty WWII, Dying Light: Bad Blood, Escape From Tarkov, and Tekken 7 now support Nvidia Highlights, which automatically captures compelling moments of gameplay using Nvidia ShadowPlay technology. The new version of GeForce Experience also enables Nvidia Ansel in Pure Farming 2018, Q.U.B.E. 2, and Star Wars Battlefront II. Ansel isn’t active in Battlefront yet, but Nvidia said the feature would go live tomorrow.

Nvidia also said that GeForce Game Ready Driver 391.24 includes two new filters for Nvidia Freestyle, including Old Film and Tilt-Shift.

Anticipated VR Bug Fix

For most GeForce graphics card owners, Nvidia’s new driver is just that—a new driver. But for some VR headset owners, this update was supposed to be their salvation. When Nvidia released version 390.65 of its Game Ready drivers, several VR headset owners started reporting that their headsets would go black five seconds after launching a game.

In February, Oculus asked the Rift community to share log data to help find a solution, and in March Nvidia turned to its community for help because it couldn’t recreate the problem in its offices. After several weeks of troubleshooting, an Nvidia support representative announced that the company found the problem and a fix would be coming in this week’s driver release.

Sure enough, Nvidia’s release notes indicate that the problem is fixed in GeForce Game Ready driver 391.24. However, several Reddit users reported that the new driver didn’t solve their problem. Worse yet, some people experienced diminished performance compared to older drivers. If you’re using a VR headset, you may want to stick with version 388.59 of Nvidia’s drivers until the black screen issue is fully sorted out. 

Available Now

Nvidia’s new GeForce Game Ready driver 391.24 is available at Nvidia’s website as a standalone download. If you want to take advantage of the Nvidia Highlights and Ansel features, you’ll need the new version of GeForce Experience.