Nvidia Fixes Driver Bug That Caused High CPU Usage After Quitting Games

Nvidia has released a new driver update for its GeForce graphics cards that, among other things, introduced a new Video Super Resolution scaling technology that can improve low-resolution video on high-resolution screens. But the driver (version 531.18) also seemed to contain a bug that was causing high CPU usage on some PCs after launching and then closing the game.

Nvidia has released a driver patch (version 531.26) that acknowledges and should fix an issue that appears to have been caused by an undisclosed bug in the “Nvidia Container”- a process that exists primarily to contain other processes shipped with Nvidia drivers. It also fixes a “random error checking”issue that may affect some older laptops with GeForce 1000 or MX250 and MX350 series GPUs.

Not all PCs with newer Nvidia drivers were affected by this bug – some reporters observed the behavior on their own systems, while others did not. Even relatively low CPU usage in the 10 to 15 percent range can have a noticeable impact on performance by taking CPU cycles away from other tasks and preventing the CPU from going into an idle state. This generates more heat and consumes more power, and can also affect battery life for laptop users.

Another recent software bug in Nvidia drivers was causing games to slow down when the Discord app was running in the background; an issue with the application profile was preventing the GPU memory from reaching its peak clock speeds, lowering the frame rate accordingly. This fix can be run in the background on a PC running Nvidia software, but installing the CPU usage error fix requires downloading and installing a typical 850MB Nvidia driver package.