Owners of Nvidia graphics cards will want to make certain that their hardware is up to date, as the company has issued a new security alert. According to Nvidia, hackers have discovered a new vulnerability across Windows and Linux drivers, allowing them to gain access to PCs and wreak some major havoc. Forget about having a non-operational PC; the exploit could allow bad actors to get away with crucial data stored on your PC or inject some malicious code that would give them unfettered access.
Nvidia users can grab the new security software update for GPU display drivers post-haste and upgrade to driver version 596.49. You can grab the download directly from Nvidia or through the Nvidia app on Windows. All Nvidia drivers before Version 596.36–or Version 482.53 for GTX 10-series users and below–are potentially at risk. As spotted by Digital Foundry, Linux users will want to update their drivers to version 590.48.01 to beef up their PC security.
In related news, Nvidia recently introduced a beta version of what it’s calling Auto Shader Compilation. PC gamers who have spent an annoying amount of time waiting for a game to finish compiling shaders will be interested in this update, as it’s designed to determine when your PC is idle and then use that time to compile shaders for your games in the background. Potentially, this could save users a lot of time and get them into their newly installed games faster, but the feature is only rolling out to RTX 50-series cards currently.
It has also been more warmly received by Nvidia owners, compared to the infamously negative reception to DLSS 5. Labeled as an AI slop filter for games, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang appeared on the Lex Fridman podcast back in March to do some damage control after initially proclaiming all critics of DLSS 5 as “completely” wrong.
