Nvidia addresses low-performance issue on Windows after October updates
Windows users who have installed the October 2025 updates for the operating system may have noticed a lower than usual performance in certain games according to reports.
While Microsoft has not confirmed the gaming issue officially, as it does not list a single known issue for Windows 11 at the time of writing, Nvidia has noticed and released a hotfix to address the issue.
Nvidia's description of the issue is vague, as it does not list any games by name or the exact issue, other than lower performance, that users may experience: "Lower performance may be observed in some games after updating to Windows 11 October 2025 KB5066835 [5561605]".
However, the release of a hotfix usually means that the issue is widespread or serious enough to warrant an out-of-bounds release of a new driver for Nvidia video cards.
A new hotfix driver -- GeForce Hotfix Display Driver version 581.94 -- is now available for supported Nvidia video cards that address the issue, according to Nvidia's report. It is based on the recently released Game Ready Driver 581.80, which Nvidia released in early November to improve support for new games such as Anno 117: Pax Romana.
Windows users with Nvidia cards who noticed issues in games, such as lower than usual performance, may install the hotfix driver to address it.
The download is provided on this webpage on Nvidia's website. The hotfix is provided for Windows 11 and Windows 10 devices, which suggests, that both are affected by the issue.
Note that the hotfix driver has a size of about 850 megabytes. Once downloaded, run the executable file and proceed with the installation. A restart of the system is required to complete the installation.
If all went well, performance issues caused by the October 2025 and newer updates, should be a thing of the past.
Now You: how often do you install video card drivers on your systems? Do you install the latest drivers immediately after release? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
Abandon all hope, ye who boot into Windows 11, for here the true torments are not metaphorical—they are kernel-level betrayals etched into every cumulative update.
Descend past the cosmetic frost of rounded corners into the burning core where performance itself is crucified. On versions 24H2 and 25H2, the October and November 2025 patches (KB5066835 and KB5068861) quietly throttle gaming FPS through a Nvidia driver incompatibility that Microsoft and Nvidia only acknowledged after thousands reported stuttering in titles like Counter-Strike and Fortnite—frames dropping as if dragged down by the chains into Cocytus.
File Explorer crawls like a penitent flagellant, taking seconds to open folders that Windows 10 rendered instantly, while the taskbar remains an immovable monolith, its icons sometimes vanishing entirely after updates, leaving users clicking ghosts.
Printers connected via USB hubs refuse to awaken from sleep, audio devices flicker with spatial sound glitches, and localhost connections—vital for developers—were severed entirely by an October emergency update, turning local servers into unreachable phantoms until Microsoft issued a panicked out-of-band fix.
Smart-card authentication fails with demonic consistency in enterprise environments, Task Manager refuses to die when closed (lingering as zombie processes that devour RAM), and large archive extractions once triggered catastrophic 0x8000FFFF errors until November’s grudging patch.
BSODs bloom like black roses on ARM devices attempting Roblox, recovery environments break under security updates, and the Settings app still buries basic toggles behind contradictory sub-menus that mock every search attempt.
Here, in this frozen hell of forced restarts and “Something went wrong” dialogs, the only warmth comes from the glowing rage of users who trusted Microsoft’s promises. The wind howls with another “Checking for updates,” and the ice thickens.
A bit of over-dramatizing in my opinion, but it’s mostly accurate. I haven’t used Windows since early 2024, but for me the most obvious issues were with the overall performance of the OS. It was slow and heavy, when I only used Windows on a relatively powerful PC I didn’t notice, because I had no frame of reference, but when I moved to another OS I noticed how lightweight that OS was and how heavy Windows was. And most people can’t make that difference, because they use Windows only full time.
I hear Windows’ code is now partially built by AI so it causes a lot of problems and overall the quality has dropped a lot, but I think their main leverage is they know they are a monopoly on the PC market so they can afford to do whatever they want and people can’t do anything about it except complain. And if you have a powerful enough PC you probably won’t even notice most of the issues. I know a lot of people who aren’t technically savvy and don’t put much emphasis on their PCs or OS, they just use them for work or to watch something or play something so they just don’t care that much if something is wrong, they don’t even complain or look for ways to fix it. I can relate to this when I got my first PC at age 13 with Windows XP and I barely knew anything so as long as it “worked” and I could play my games, I was happy. It was years later when I learned some things that I started to get annoyed when things aren’t working better, but it’s not the case for most people, I think we should take that into perspective.
Nice review about the current state of Windows 11 garbage!
Well you know some users obsess with benchmarks and anything remotely showing a loss of performance is a crisis. Is this a Nvidia driver issue or really a Windows issue?
You’re most likely right. Windows is becoming more bloated and slow with every version and update. So much background processes working all the time, you need an SSD to be able to get below 1 minute boot time nowadays. The solution from Microsoft is “just throw more power at it … durrr..” That’s their only strategy – the OS will become more slow and bloated and the system requirements will just keep increasing.
The official Microsoft website says you need 4GB RAM for Windows 11 and 64 GB of space. It also says you need a 1GHz CPU, although they don’t specify that you can’t use a CPU from 2003, it has to be something new that has TPM 2.0 support and if it’s that new it’s probably much more powerful than just a tiny 1GHz CPU from 2003. Also mentions SSD if you want to use their AI bloatware spyware too.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/windows-11-specifications?r=1
No wonder hardware companies like nVidia and AMD have to work around the mess that Windows has left for them to fix the ever-declining performance of games on Windows.
Now Windows 11 working in idle uses so much resources that compared to when Windows XP was the latest, it would be equal to the PC working in overdrive mode and close to exploding.
Here are my system resources on a fresh boot without any programs open, I wonder how many people who use Windows 11 can say the same:
https://i.ibb.co/fGBnKZ0D/image.png
And in comparison to Windows 11’s system requirements, here are those for Linux Mint:
2GB RAM (4GB recommended for a comfortable usage).
20GB of disk space (100GB recommended).
1024×768 resolution
https://linuxmint.com/faq.php
Windows 11:
Processor 1 gigahertz (GHz)?or?faster with 2 or more cores on a?compatible 64-bit processor
RAM 4 gigabytes (GB)
Storage 64 GB or larger storage device
TPM Trusted Platform Module (TPM) version 2.0.
Graphics card Compatible with DirectX 12 or later with WDDM 2.0 driver.
There are Linux distros with even lower system requirements, like 1GB RAM, 512GB RAM, less than 10GB disk space, etc.
On Linux you can do 95% of the things you can do on Windows only not 100% because Linux doesn’t have enough official support. And all of that for free and takes less hardware power to achieve it. I don’t want to make this about Windows vs Linux, but I want to make a clear comparison what has happened to Windows for being a market monopoly for 30 years and how it will keep getting worse while another competitor achieves the same results with less. The sad part is Microsoft don’t care as long as they are a monopoly and Windows will not improve unless they are threatened by something else, people will keep using Windows and complain how it’s getting worse and keep using it… like Stockholm Syndrome.
When I was on Windows with two different PCs with nVidia I don’t recall ever having lower performance in games due to drivers or them making things better. One PC had GT 630, the other GTX 1650 and while both were low level GPUs, it was fine.
Something makes me feel this matters for high level GPUs where they observe significant performance differences and it’s in the manner of 100-300 FPS, something that lowe level GPUs aren’t even concerned with.