Nvidia's 378.49 GPU drivers break hardware encoding in Steam

Some Nvidia graphics card owners who installed the company's latest 378.49 GPU drivers—advertised as being Game Ready for Resident Evil 7: Biohazard—are running into headaches. There are a few different complaints of wonky behavior, one of which is that the drivers effectively break Steam's In-Home Steaming feature. Valve mentions this in the release notes for a recent Steam beta client update.

"The latest Nvidia drivers have broken hardware encoding in Steam, please revert back to driver version 376.33 if you need that. We are working with Nvidia to get a driver fix," Valve states.

Other complaints can be found in the comments section at PCPerspective. One user says he ran into a black screen during installation and is experiencing system crashes, while another claims that it's wreaking havoc with this GeForce GTX 980 Ti graphics card.

"Broke my PhysX and Compute on my 980 Ti on Windows 10. Rolling back," the use wrote.

There's also a spattering of complaints on Reddit. Most of them seem to be minor issues, such as stuttering and artifacts in certain games, as opposed to major issues like persistent blue screens.

In addition to bringing an optimized game experience to RE7, the 378.49 drivers also include enhancements for Conan Exiles (early access) and For Honor (closed beta). If you play any of those three titles and don't use Steam's In-Home Streaming feature, it might still be worth giving the drivers a install. Otherwise, it's best to err on the side of caution and wait for the next update.

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