Flight simulation pilots may want to think twice before updating their graphics drivers.

The latest NVIDIA GeForce driver, version 591.44, is drawing widespread concern across the flight simulation community, with a growing number of users reporting serious performance and stability issues.

Reports are coming in from users of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, and X-Plane, with problems ranging from crashes and severe stuttering to rendering glitches and lost VR connections.

Virtual reality users appear to be especially affected, including pilots who are not running Sim Innovations or other third-party cockpit software.

Multiple community forums, including official sim forums and Reddit, indicate that many users have successfully resolved these issues by rolling back to the previous NVIDIA driver, version 581.80. As a result, that rollback is quickly becoming the community’s recommended workaround.

At this time, NVIDIA has not issued an official statement or fix, but given the volume and consistency of reports, sim pilots are being urged to delay installing driver 591.44 or revert if they’ve already updated.

Sky Blue Radio will continue monitoring the situation and will share updates as soon as NVIDIA releases a corrected driver or official guidance.

Until then, consider this a friendly preflight warning: sometimes the newest update isn’t the smoothest flight.