If you’re an Nvidia GeForce user and you’ve noticed weird artifacting issues on animated GIFs recently, the problem may be with your graphics card — or, more accurately, a recent set of drivers for your graphics card. Today, Nvidia released a hotfix patch that should take care of these problems.
Last month, Nvidia released version 375.57 of its GeForce Game Ready WHQL graphics driver, which is thought the be the root of the issues users are experiencing. Version 375.63 came hot on its heels in an attempt to solve persistent crashes on Windows 10, but other faults were still present as of version 375.50, Nvidia’s latest driver release.
The most noticeable issue is the appearance of unsightly artifacts when animated GIFs are being displayed, according to a report from Tech Spot. Apparently, this was supposed to be fixed in the most recent patch, but those efforts were delayed.
The other problem was a distracting flickering that has been affecting certain monitors with a high refresh rate. This issue is less common than the artifacting on animated GIFs, but has nonetheless plagued a particular set of users for several months.
Users are advised to only install the hotfix drivers if they are experiencing either of the issues that the update sets out to fix. Version 375.76 doesn’t make any other changes, and it doesn’t offer any further optimizations for particular games, so it’s safe to stick with version 375.70 if you’re unaffected — as with any hotfix release, there’s a slim chance that version 375.76 could cause problems on a system that doesn’t require it.
Anyone who has experienced flickering on a high-refresh-rate monitor, or artifacts in animated GIFs, can download the new drivers via the support page on the Nvidia website.
