Games not running smoothly? Nvidia employee says to try ditching recent Windows 10 update

PC gamers have been advised by an Nvidia staff member that if they are suffering performance issues with games, it’s worth trying to roll back a recent Windows 10 update.

Manuel, who is admin of the official Nvidia forums, observes: “If you are seeing lower performance in games, check if rolling back Windows 10 Update KB5000842 solves the issue.”

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While KB5000842 is a preview update (which is entirely optional) from March, as Windows Central (which spotted the Nvidia post) points out, the same game-related problems appear to be present in the recent KB5001330 update. So logically, the same advice applies – if you’re seeing performance dips in games, try getting rid of the update.

As we saw last week, when the KB5001330 patch went live (for the Windows 10 versions from last year), some gamers complained of nasty stuttering or frame rate drops – and we witnessed reports that rolling back the update cured these issues, at least in some cases.

Nvidia’s admin is, of course, suggesting trying that very same thing, so it could well be worth a whirl. Note that these issues aren’t specific to Nvidia graphics cards – folks with AMD GPUs are also reporting similar incidents of glitching.

Extent unknown

While there are plenty of posts like this – “haven’t been able to play anything well since the update” – on Reddit, we must remember that there are folks chiming in to say their PC remains unaffected too (and most of those who aren’t hit by the problem won’t be hunting online about it, either, of course).

Still, that doesn’t detract from the reports made by those who have taken a performance hit following the latest Windows 10 update (or indeed the previous optional one).

Microsoft is still yet to comment regarding the game-related hitches here, but of course it’s worth bearing in mind that KB5001330 comes with some security fixes – apparently pertaining to ‘basic operations’ within Windows 10 – and if you steer clear of it, you’ll be without that protection.

So if you are hesitant about applying KB5001330, it’s worth remembering that it’s easy enough to ditch the patch as suggested if you do happen to run into problems (gaming ones, or the other issues which have been highlighted recently).

For those not sure of how to get rid of an applied update, we’ve got an article on how to uninstall a Windows 10 update which guides you through the process step-by-step.

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