(Updated) Temperature Sensor Bug Hit NVIDIA GPUs With Latest Drivers

NVIDIA’s GPU driver mishaps in recent weeks has gotten pretty bad, ranging from black screens, crashes, and many glitches in between. While the latest April driver (version 576.02) was meant to fix a majority of these issues, it also inadvertently created a new one – a temperature sensor bug that causes values to get stuck, as reported by various users.

More NVIDIA Driver Woes

So far, this bug points to “NvAPI_GPU_GetThermalSettings” API being the issue, which can be triggered if the PC enters sleep mode. The only known workaround is a full reboot of the PC, as developer of MSI Afterburner, Alexey “Unwinder” Nicolaychuk, wrote in Guru3D forums (replying to a theory of this bug potentially triggered by Afterburner or RTSS):

Removing/reinstalling temperature monitoring software has nothing to do with this driver’s bug, it makes no sense and doesn’t fix anything. Fully rebooting PC after sleep mode or after fast startup (both may trigger stuck sensor) is the key factor and the only cure.

On paper, a simple error on sensor data could be largely a non-issue, but since this particular error pertains to GPU temperature, this could potentially be dangerous. Reason being, various GPU parameters rely on temperature readings to adjust accordingly, such as core clocks and voltages – an erroneous value may result in these values running beyond what it was designed for and potentially introduce instability, or worse, damaging the silicon.

PC Games Hardware, which uncovered this story, noted that the result of this sensor bug is still theoretical. “Since the associated consequences cannot currently be estimated, the advice is: stay away from the new GeForce driver until NVIDIA issues a statement. A bug-fix driver should be released soon,” the publication wrote (machine-translated). In response, NVIDIA has since updated the driver changelog to include this bug under Known Issues section.

UPDATED @ 04:00, 22/4/25 – NVIDIA has published a hotfix driver update addressing this particular bug, which is now available to download.

Pokdepinion: Just as we installed this new driver on our very own RTX 5090…