It seems like there have been many posts lately about newer Nvidia drivers causing crashes in MSFS. Personally, I’m using a fairly old driver due to stability issues with newer one in MSFS.
With SU14 due in December, could Asobo and Nvidia work together to release a game ready driver specific to Flight Simulator?
Please and thank you 
Voted in phantom wishlist.
It’s not just MSFS, the newer NVidia drivers are a mess ever since the 40* series released and also cause other games to CTD (eg: Starfield) and can also cause Windows 11 to BSOD.
Currently finding 545.92 relatively stable.
Thank you Sonicviz. I havent had a full flight in over two weeks ! But your post about the Nvidia driver your using now 545.92 allowed me to have my first full flight in a long time. im staying with this driver for long as I can.
My point exactly
545.92 is a very recent driver, only 2 behind the current one 546.17 Release Date: 2023.11.14
See my post here: Sim crashes when zooming in at the worldmap - #361 by Sonicviz
It’s also stabilised the CTD’s I was having with Starfield, as well as BSOD’s with Win 11, which is my point.
So while a game ready driver specific to MSFS might fix one issue, it’s not the whole picture and likely won’t fix all the issues with NVidia drivers. There’s either something going on with their build process that regularly insert something that upsets windows at a low level (and hence games that rely on that), or the driver code for new fixes is unstable on windows 11 so not really fixes at all, or [insert here].
But the fact that sometimes one version is relatively stable indicates it’s possible to get stability.
This is the issue Microsoft needs to be talking about with NVidia, not specifically MSFS.
Asobo should stop releasing world updates and SU and focus on fine tuning the performance and stability but with MSFS 2024 i might be feasable.
Agree, the 546.1 is a FS CTD inducer. 537.xx was the last fluid and stable one for me (3090, dx11).
It would be great if NVidia could work with MS towards stability for FS with new driver releases across older cards. I’ve always gone with latest drivers up until now. This is the first set of repeatable FS CTD inducing ones.
Would also like it if NVidia didn’t do a weekly driver update. Monthly is surely more than adequate with more time for stability testing. Seems like they are rushing out releases to accommodate new games.
I also note that their latest release 546.17 mentions improving “stability” a lot, just not in a FS context. Can somone go try it and report back?
@Sonicviz what are your pc specs?
I’m using the 545.84 driver, and am not having any issues. A friend and I were on a MP flight last night and about a half hour into the flight, he had a CTD. Tried the flight again, and he had another CTD. I later found out that earlier in the day, he had updated to the 546.17 driver. I helped him revert to the 545.84 driver and he repeated the flight without a hitch. There must be some stability issue in that new driver, so update with caution. I know he has a 20 series graphics card.
Ryzen 3700X 32gb + RTX 2060 OC in 2k + VR w/OpenXR Toolkit optimisation.
I get great MSFS performance (and other games) on a combination of high/ultra + DLSS Quality + some NVidia CP tweaks + no GeForce Experience, once I can rely on a driver release to be stable enough.
It really is a crapshoot ever since they released the 40* series, but touch wood 545.92 seem the best of the recent NVidia driver releases so far.
The same CTD’s seem to always crop up with them as well. “Mysterious” Win 11 BSOD Hypervisor errors that disappear (more or less) once you get a stable NVidia driver, Starfield suddenly doesn’t reboot your PC on shutdown, Map zoom in MSFS doesn’t CTD randomly.
Stability (for some) but also performance. I had a small drop in sim smoothness too. 537.xx runs better for me. Maybe it’s add on/mods, maybe it’s dx11/dlss etc who knows. Way too many variables. I just wish they could retain existing perf while rushing their updated GRD’s out mainly for newer games and 40xx cards. It’s crazy having a GRD release a week to go test. You can waste maybe a whole 3hrs just to find out you get a CTD on final.
Nvidia drivers are not responsible for the world map CTDs. At that point only the user interface is being rendered. Those CTDs started the day avionics updates were released, and there was no new Nvidia drivers published yet. Prior to the patch there were no CTDs at world map. After the patch the CTDs started. They were some of the first issues reported in the forum.
Cheers
It’s more complex than that.
I do have some experience working with the MSFS UI, including the World Map, and tend to notice things that affect it.
I don’t want to argue about it either way, I’m just reporting my experiences in testing while resolving my own sudden world map zooming CTD’s with different solutions, which also seem to be validated by a couple of other users too.
FWIW, the MSFS UI system is a complex multilayered framework with the bottom layer being the Coherent GT UI platform, which is GPU accelerated afaik. The map is rendered at a lower level than the other UI elements, from what I recall poking around in the guts of it.
My point being while the network issues may well be the main cause of the map zoom CTD (as discussed on the main thread about the issue), it’s also possible there are some other trigger conditions related to GPU drivers under certain conditions. This can make it a little tricky to resolve if you have issues, so it’s just another possible solution to try if the other ones don’t work to resolve your issues.
Indeed what happens can be seen in the crash logs: game retrieves few MB from Bing maps, attempts to load them while you request the zoom but then reports several PB to be deleted from VRAM (yes, several Petabytes).
See example for my 4090 card. With 24GB budget just 9 textures require an insane amount of 18.000 PB to be deleted. I would say the problem is the integration with Bing maps or someone using the wrong units. Disabling Bing maps does not produce any CTDs in game.
VideoMemoryBudget=24524095488|
TexturesToDeleteCount=9|
TexturesToDeleteTotalSize=18446744072970108928|
When you see a CTD out of nowhere (they are random as well as the world map ones) you most likely find the same error in the logs. I just had another CTD while flying with exactly the same reported data. It was 975 textures instead, but still something in the range of 18.000 PB to be deleted. Yesterday I had also CTDs, for 2 and 3 textures only and still the same problem.
Cheers
I agree with the OP. There are so many Nvidia releases, it would be very helpful to have a version that was endorsed by MSFS for the current release. At present I’m using 537.42 which gives me the occasional CTD which is very annoying. I have a (relatively) low end setup - laptop with an RTX3060 and the combination of new MSFS release every 3/4 months and a new nVidia release every week means it’s impossible to know what is best. I think 537.42 was good for SU12 but isn’t so good for SU13 - which makes the point of the OP
I tried 545.92 again today and I’m getting the same results as I was when it was released. Long pauses, stuttering and a crash. I went back to 536.99 and the sim is stable again. The 537 drivers don’t crash either, however I get screen flash and flickering with bloom on using those drivers.
It’s so consistently inconsistent, it’s amazing!
tbf though, there’s a lot of variables at play here.