March 8, 2023 Update: Nvidia and AMD have now issued new drivers (opens in new tab) to address these issues.

The latest round of graphics card updates won't make anyone look good, as both AMD and Nvidia have shipped drivers that could do bad things to your PC. First, Nvidia has a relatively simple CPU overuse issue (open in new tab) that occurs after exiting a game, and the basic workaround is simply to revert to the previous driver. Second, AMD drivers can, in rare cases, completely corrupt Windows installations.

Eh. This is a pretty big problem, but it's actually not AMD's fault; it happens with both this latest Adrenalin driver and the previous one; it's Windows' propensity to update the OS at all costs.

The February Adrenalin 23.2.1 driver and the current 23.2.2 version may completely brick your machine, as has happened to many Radeon owners, as well as Brad Chacos of PC World (opens in new tab). They document the "exotic" steps they took to recover their test rigs and the pain they went through after a driver update brought them to a halt.

The problem is that in the middle of installing a new AMD driver, Windows decides that whatever it is doing must update something, and it rarely breaks the system Chacos notes that up to the point of rebooting the machine, the installation is It works fine, and at that point, he found that the boot->BSOD cycle is continuous.

The workaround, which resulted from a painstaking back-and-forth with AMD engineers, is to press the PC's power switch during the brief moment when the BIOS key-press option screen appears and the Windows logo spins. This will trigger an automatic recovery event and allow the user to select advanced options to sort out the system.

This is easier said than done, and Chacos had to press the power button on 15 different boots before actually achieving a successful recovery.

A startup repair reportedly made things worse, but a system restore to a previous restore point got things working again, although confusion between AMD's drivers and Windows' determined update process went a long way, At least there is a solution.

To avoid this situation when updating drivers, AMD recommends unchecking the factory reset checkbox in the Adrenalin installation options. This is really only necessary if you are updating from an Nvidia card (and even then it may not help), so it is worth unchecking for now. AMD has issued the following statement to PC World about this workaround: "We have reproduced an issue that can occur in a very small number of cases when a PC update is performed during the installation of AMD software: We have reproduced an issue that can occur in a very small number of cases when a PC update is performed during the installation of Adrenaline Edition. We recommend that you ensure that all system updates are applied or paused before installing the driver and that the "Factory Reset" option is unchecked during the AMD driver installation process. We are committed to resolving issues as quickly as possible, and we strongly encourage users to report problems with the AMD software: we strongly recommend that issues related to Adrenaline Edition be submitted via the bug reporting tool.

This issue with Nvidia's drivers is not fatal, but is still annoying if CPU resources are unnecessarily occupied by the Nvidia Container software after exiting a game.

This error has been reported to consume 10-15% of CPU resources, sometimes more. This error is reported to consume 10-15% of CPU resources, sometimes more. If you notice an increase in fan noise recently, this may be the cause. Check Task Manager after exiting the game to see if there are any Nvidia Container entries occupying processor silicon.

The solution is to force that process to terminate via Task Manager or revert to an earlier driver that does not have the funky new AI video upscaling feature (open in new tab) built in or the latest game optimization features.

Nvidia has added this issue to the list of known issues with their drivers, so there may be a hotfix available soon if we can pinpoint exactly what the problem is.