Videos freezing and the screen going black since last Wednesday? Nvidia's fix is not in the usual place

Nvidia pushed Game Ready driver 621.01 on 21 October. Owners of RTX 50 series cards started reporting the same thing shortly after: video playback freezing, the display dropping to black for a few seconds, the driver resetting itself. Not in games particularly. In Chrome, in Edge, in VLC. The sort of fault that makes you suspect your monitor cable.

The fix arrived on 27 October as hotfix driver 621.12. Alongside the video bug it handles three smaller ones: an Unreal Engine 5.8 crash when Ray Lighting Mode is set to Hit Lighting, HDMI corruption on an RTX Spark connected through a StarTech Thunderbolt 3 adapter, and flickering on the MSI N16 Flip.

What matters is how you get it and whether you should. Hotfix drivers do not appear in the Nvidia app or anywhere on Windows Update. They live only on Nvidia's Customer Care site, and the company is blunt about what they are: "these Hotfix drivers are beta, optional and provided as-is", put through a much shortened testing process, with the advice that "the safest option is to wait for the next WHQL certified driver". Everything in 621.12 will turn up in the next signed release anyway.

So the sensible split is this. If your videos are fine, do nothing. If they are not, you have two routes, the hotfix or rolling back to the driver you had before 21 October, and the second one is often easier to undo. Either way, take a copy of your working drivers before you change anything, which is what Tendvane's driver backup is for, so getting back to a known-good state is a restore rather than a hunt through old downloads.