Geforce Game Ready Driver 531.18: High CPU Load Reports

With Nvidia’s latest drivers for Geforce graphics cards, Release 531.18, reports of high CPU loads are increasing. Some notice 10 percent and more than usual when starting games and also after closing them. The “Nvidia Container” process, which exists several times, can be observed in the task manager. One of the processes may stand out with unusual CPU load. Nvidia itself the problem of high CPU load in the still open problems of the driver – but how this affects in practice was not clear until now.

Exactly who is affected and why is still unclear. Until the problem is solved, if you are affected, you should upgrade to the last driver and then you will have peace for the time being, although you will lose the optimizations and bug fixes for games. RTX Video Super Resolution was also introduced with 531.18 – maybe the error is related to that.

With RTX VSR, Nvidia says AI and Tensor cores improve the quality of videos in Edge and Chrome web browsers by removing blocky compression artifacts and upscaling video resolution. This improves video quality and clarity, while users can watch videos on popular platforms in their native resolution on high-resolution displays up to 4K.

High CPU load for no apparent reason doesn’t seem to be the release’s only problem either. Gamers are reporting BSOD screens when launching games – especially on notebooks. If you don’t have any problems with driver 531.18, you’re welcome to use it – otherwise it’s probably advisable to wait until Nvidia publishes a new release.

Source: Nvidia forums, Twitter #1, Twitter #2