What I find strange are the number of people minimizing Nvidia driver mistakes. I, however, know I have run out of fingers to count the number of bad drivers this organization has put out in the last 3-4 years. There are people in this thread that will remember I have remarked numerous times that Nvidia seems to be trying to give MS a run for their money with releasing bad updates....like they hired some ex-MS employees. Yet today, here we are with minimizing....
Yet is strange people in here try to minimize the impact these drivers are causing problems but everyone loses their friggin mind when AMD has a goof.
It's definitely not minimizing - if the issue was widespread we would've had at least one GTX1060 owner on TPU with this problem.
I've just read through first 3 pages of NVidia forums and 10 pages of 397.31 feedback and so far it's the same 4 people complaining about artifacts, ERROR_43 and BSODs, which are a clear indicator of device failure or a driver conflict (judging by timing and wording, the same people complained on reddit). Previous versions of NV drivers were also prone to this exact issue when combined with Lucid VIRTU(now-defunct company with non-existing website).
BTW, my assumption about Windows 7 was wrong, cause the OP symptom description was made up. There was no reboot prompt, and all affected users are on Windows 10 x64. No bootloop, just artifacts and BSODs.
Also, this quote from NV Reddit sums it up well:
Bear in mind that people who have no issues tend to not post on Reddit or forums. Unless there is significant coverage about specific driver issue, chances are they are fine. Try it yourself and you can always DDU and reinstall old driver if needed.
People always complain about drivers on both sides, but fail to troubleshoot their PCs beforehand or provide details afterwards. I think in the past 10 years I only had 3-4 problems with any GPU drivers:
- AMD APU drivers showed wrong temps (or stuck at constant value)
- AMD Mobile graphics driver completely disabling backlight on ASUS laptops w/ 5000-series dGPUs
- NVidia forgetting to disable eGPU mode in one of their Maxwell drivers
- Timeout detection on NV drivers w/ 700-series cards from 2 years ago(don't remember the exact version).
Those issues were really widespread (and could be replicated with 100% accuracy on the same hardware), but I'm pretty sure that they had way less public attention than 4 dudes with broken GPUs.