Grab this GPU driver if you scored an RTX 3060 Ti, or are getting blue screen crashes

For those of you who were quick on the trigger finger yesterday and managed to secure a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti graphics card before it inevitably sold out, Nvidia is serving up a new GPU driver that adds support for your shiny new piece of hardware. It also fixes two separate 'blue screen of death' errors, or BSODs—those dreaded Windows crashes that dump you into a blue screen before rebooting.

Support for the 3060 Ti is really the highlight, though. The latest 457.51 WHQL driver is deemed "Game Ready" for Nvidia's latest version of Ampere, and that essentially means this driver will ensure you are getting the best experience from your new card, in terms of performance and reliability.

"The GeForce RTX 3060 Ti is available now. Faster than the $699 RTX 2080 Super, and beating the RTX 2060 Super by an average of 40 percent, the new $399 GeForce RTX 30 Series graphics card is a tremendous purchase for gamers seeking blistering 1080p and 1440p max setting performance," Nvidia says.

We agree, it is a tremendous purchase, just that actually buying one is the tricky part. Nvidia noted after the GeForce RTX 3080 launch that it was seeing "unprecedented demand" for Ampere, and that seems to have continued for the 3090, 3070, and now the 3060 Ti, all of which sold out pretty much immediately.

Beyond that, there are no specific game optimizations with this driver, but there are a few bug fixes. Nvidia says this driver fixes an issue that can cause blue screen crashes when waking from sleep while running an Ampere GPU. Separately, it also fixes a blue screen bug that can occur when playing or browsing videos from the Chrome browser. It's not clear if that also affects the modern version of Edge, which is based on the same Chromium engine as Chrome.

There are two other bug fixes in this release. One is after launching and then closing Star Wars: Squadrons, Freestyle/Ansel stops working in supported games. The other is that Lenovo Y740 laptops can have a corrupted display after waking from sleep.

Nvidia also lists a bunch of known issues that are not yet fixed. They include:

• [Steam VR game]: Stuttering and lagging occur upon launching a game.
• [G-Sync][Nvidia Ampere GPU architecture]: GPU power consumption may increase in idle mode on systems using certain higher refresh-rate G-Sync monitors.
• [Freestyle][Vulkan apps]: With the freestyle filters applied, a blue-screen crash occurs when pressing Alt+Tab while running Vulkan applications.
• [Sunset Overdrive]: The game may display random green corruption if Depth of Field is enabled from in-game settings.
• [Forza Motorsport 7]: The curb may display a black strip during a race on certain tracks.
• [YouTube]: Video playback stutters while scrolling down the YouTube page.
• When setting the refresh rate higher than 100Hz, the color format switches from RGB to ycbcr422.
• [Notebook]: Some Pascal-based notebooks w/ high refresh rate displays may randomly drop to 60Hz during gameplay.

You can grab the latest driver through the GeForce Experience software, or install it manually from Nvidia's driver download page. That said, if none of the fixed issues affect you and you did not secure a 3060 Ti, this is one you can skip and not miss a beat.