If you have NVIDIA GTX graphics (not RTX), this interests you

Martin Woolridge 1 year ago 3 min read

Even though NVIDIA RTX hardware with real-time ray tracing has been around for a few years now, there are still plenty of users using it. NVIDIA GTX graphics cards From the Maxwell and Pascal generations, the graphics are still perfectly gameable for even modern triple-A games. Many of these users have been complaining for weeks that all of a sudden, The screen turned black In some situations, but the good news today is that NVIDIA has released the new firmware For these graphs that solve this problem.

Generally, this issue mostly affects users of GeForce 10, GeForce 900, GeForce 700, Titan (Maxwell, Pascal, XP) and Quadro (Maxwell, Pascal) graphics cards, so if you have an NVIDIA GTX graphics card from these families and have recently suffered from black screens while gaming or on your desktop, keep reading because NVIDIA already has the solution.

Black screenshot on some NVIDIA GTX graphics

The issues we mentioned with the NVIDIA GTX series graphics we mentioned a moment ago occur when the monitor is connected through the DisplayPort 1.3 / 1.4 graphics outputs. In fact, apart from the black screen, some users also reported that the computer freezes completely right after booting up, so NVIDIA has released a new firmware update for these graphics cards which fixes the problem.

Obviously, if your computer freezes when you try to start the computer, you will have difficulty installing this firmware update. In the next section, we detail what NVIDIA says about it, but we also recommend trying some alternatives, such as moving the graphics card to your friend’s computer and installing the firmware there (remember, it’s firmware installed on the graphics card, not a driver on your computer).

How to install this update

To install this firmware, you will need to access the NVIDIA web site Follow the detailed instructions there. The process is not complicated at all, but it is a bit delicate, so we recommend that you follow the instructions to the letter to avoid potential problems. It is an update wizard, so in general you will just have to follow the steps and let the tool do its job.

In addition to fixing the issues we already mentioned (especially fixing the black screen on NVIDIA GTX graphics cards connected via DisplayPort), this firmware update brings some new features. This is what NVIDIA says about it (own translation):

The NVIDIA Firmware Updater will detect if your graphics card needs to update its firmware, and if so, it will provide the user with the option to do so. If the screen goes blank or the computer freezes during startup when using a display connected by DisplayPort 1.3/1.4, try one of the following solutions to get the tool working:

Boot with the HDMI or DVI video output.
Turn on the computer using a different monitor.
Change the boot mode from UEFI to Legacy or from Legacy to UEFI in BIOS.
Turn on the computer with a different graphics card (such as the integrated one).