NVIDIA has rolled out its own fix after it was discovered that a now-infamous Windows update caused much more problems than previously known. At this point, the Windows 11 update often known as KB5066835 could, kind of, be regarded as the update that broke Microsoft’s latest OS, and while it remained functional for a lot of, there have been also many problems introduced that required fixing. Before digging into the most recent findings regarding gaming performance, let’s take a have a look at all the opposite fun things already known about last month’s update, which rolled out just as Microsoft officially ended support for Windows 10.
- USB devices akin to keyboards/mice would not function within the Windows Recovery environment, meaning in case you needed to do an OS repair/restore, you were out of luck using traditional technique of user input.
- Broke localhost, thus stopping developers from getting access to the needed web applications for their very own projects.
- Task Manager wouldn’t close for some users, and would proceed to duplicate after they attempted to shut it.
And now we’re as much as the newest feature of KB5066835; the bonus of getting between 10-30 FPS reduced in some games, and in response to one user, greater than 50% was lost, in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows. This caught the eye of engineers at NVIDIA, who last week rolled out a hotfix driver, which apparently did the trick since it wasn’t long after that gamers began posting the way it restored as much as 50% in performance for select titles. Sadly, one among those that posted about it stated they’d reported it to Microsoft not long after the Windows update launched, but it surely took NVIDIA to repair it thereafter.
I reported this problem to Microsoft a couple of month ago and even provided a system trace of the sport running with lower performance, but they still couldn’t/didn’t fix it. As a substitute, NVIDIA needed to work around their gross incompetence and release a Hotfix Driver to deal with it.
— Sebastian Castellanos (@Sebasti66855537) November 20, 2025
Additionally they said that Rise of the Ronin, Star Citizen, and Valheim were other titles witnessed to have degraded performance following the Windows update. One other person posted how NVIDIA’s hotfix driver 581.57 restored 65% FPS.
After change to DLAA and for ultra preset for instance pic.twitter.com/hCtnOUjmox
— Daniel Nowak (@TheAltaiir) November 21, 2025
Meanwhile, Digital Foundry did its own testing with Assassin’s Creed: Shadows and documented similar results. Their machine utilized an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D processor paired with an NVIDIA RTX 5090 graphics card, and the hotfix driver restored upwards of fifty% of the FPS. DF also mentioned that the update created issues in Counter-Strike 2.
From last month to now, it’s been a circus for various Windows users who never know what they are going to encounter after turning on their machines. Those using Windows 10 had their very own share of surprises, starting from being unable to create a Windows 11 media installation tool to false notifications regarding its end of support in the event that they’d opted for prolonged support. Meanwhile, Microsoft also recently had to deal with issues with Windows 11’s file explorer not performing as expected. Ultimately, this just goes to indicate that you simply never know what’s in store after an update is installed, and MS really needs to place more effort into its QA for them. It’s also been reported (via XDA) that one Linux distro, Zorin OS, was downloaded over 780,000 times since Windows 10 reached EoL, so MS must be being attentive to this in light of all these bugs which have popped up since.