NVIDIA blames recent Windows 11 updates for gaming issues on your PC

January 2026 was not nice to Windows users, with Microsoft confirming and people reporting plenty of bugs and quite severe issues (some PCs cannot even boot), and now, gamers are suffering as well. People have been complaining about performance and texture issues on NVIDIA's forums, and while the company is investigating the situation, a member of NVIDIA staff is offering affected users a simple solution.

Reported issues range from performance dropdowns (about 15-20 FPS, depending on the game), black screens, graphical artifacts, and more. In cases like this, people start by blaming NVIDIA drivers, especially after performing an update, but in this case, it appears that it is Microsoft's fault, as uninstalling KB5074109 fixed performance issues and other bugs.

To back users' reports, Manuel from NVIDIA's forums said that the company is still looking at the situation, but everything indicates that KB5074109 or the January 2026 Patch Tuesday update is the culprit:

Even though it started after a Windows 11 update, we are looking into it. As far as I know, the only way to resolve it appears to be uninstalling KB5074109.

Since the release of KB5074109, Microsoft issued a few more updates, including two out-of-band releases and one non-security update. The latter delivered quite a lot of useful improvements, including fixes for the bug with black screens:

[Display and Graphics] Fixed: This update addresses black screen issues in isolated multiuser environments, typically after a Windows upgrade.

If your PC exhibits similar bugs, you can try installing the latest non-security updates or rolling back KB5074109 and then pausing Windows Updates until the next batch of updates arrives. To do so, head to Settings > Windows Update > Update History > Uninstall Updates.

In January, following a big number of reported bugs and unscheduled updates, Microsoft issued a statement that it plans to fix things in 2026 and focus on "pain points" in its operating system, which include stability issues, performance, and more.

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Posted Thursday 5 February 2026 at 4:53 am AEST (my time).

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