Is Your PC Stuttering In Games And On The Web? Try This Hotfix From NVIDIA

Attention all GeForce graphics card owners, if you're system is inexplicable stuttering, the latest hotfix GPU driver from NVIDIA may be the salve to sooth your pain. Released last night, NVIDIAs hotfix driver version 551.46 purportedly addresses several situations in which stuttering may rear its ugly head, and it addresses a specific stability issue that some GeForce owners have been observing too.

According the release notes, the 551.46 hotfix driver fixes "intermittent micro-stuttering in games when vertical sync is enabled." It also addresses potential stuttering "when scrolling in web browsers on certain system configurations," which is an issue I've been having this past week, as well as stuttering in Read Dead Redemption 2 (Vulkan) on some Advanced Optimus laptops.

In addition, NVIDIA says its latest hotfix "addresses stability issues over extended gameplay" sessions in Immortals of Aveum, in case that's something you have been observing.

Unfortunately for me, the hotfix didn't relieve my recent issue with scrolling through Google's News feed, which can also affect a Gmail tab if running both at the same time. Others have complained about this on Google's support forum and also Brave's community forum.

"For the past week, scrolling on the Google News site has been choppy, and becomes almost unusable the further I scroll down. It is the only website having this issue. I found a similar recent help post on the Brave browser community help portal, but nothing else recent pertaining to any Chromium browsers," a user wrote.

Several others chimed in with similar complaints, with some claiming they've seen the same thing in Edge, Firefox, and Safari. I've only had this happen in Chrome (the News feed scrolls fine in Firefox), and to be fair, this could very well (and likely) be a Google issue, not NVIDIA. It's just curious that NVIDIA released a hotfix for, among other things, web stuttering days after this started happening. For reference, I'm running a GeForce RTX 3090 with a Core i9-11900K processor and 128GB of RAM (just enough to satiate Chrome's sometimes enormous appetite).

There is one curious quirk that is definitely on NVIDIA's end, though, which is an apparent oversight on the date of the hotfix. After installing it, GeForce Experience comically shows the 551.46 driver as having released on 2/28/2023.

If you're having stuttering issues of any kind and are running a GeForce GPU, it's worth giving the hotfix a try. These are basically out-of-band driver releases with specific fixes that are best served sooner than later.

:A GeForce driver is an incredibly complex piece of software, We have an army of software engineers constantly adding features and fixing bugs. These changes are checked into the main driver branches, which are eventually run through a massive QA process and released. Since we have so many changes being checked in, we usually try to align driver releases with significant game or product releases. This process has served us pretty well over the years but it has one significant weakness. Sometimes a change that is important to many users might end up sitting and waiting until we are able to release the driver," NVIDIA explains.

"The GeForce Hotfix driver is our way to trying to get some of these fixes out to you more quickly. These drivers are basically the same as the previous released version, with a small number of additional targeted fixes. The fixes that make it in are based in part on your feedback in the Driver Feedback threads and partly on how realistic it is for us to quickly address them," NVIDIA adds.

You won't find hotfixes being doled out via GeForce Experience, and instead need to manually download and install them. Don't worry about FOMO, though—the same fixes get rolled into the next regularly scheduled driver release anyway, so they'll eventually find their way to your PC.

Hit up NVIDIA's 551.46 release notes to download the latest hotfix.