Following the March driver update, some Windows 11 and 10 users encountered high CPU usage on their Nvidia systems. The chipmaker confirmed the high CPU usage problem and told us it would be fixed with the upcoming emergency hotfix in the next few hours.
Nvidia officials confirmed a software fix had been developed for GeForce driver version 531.18 and would arrive within several hours. As per reports on Reddit, a bug in GeForce Driver version 531.18, which was released on February 28 and widely installed by users in March, appears to cause high CPU usage
Users report that the driver causes Nvidia’s Display Container Service service to utilize up to 15 percent of their CPUs. This problem allegedly makes their laptops hot and leads to performance issues and batteries draining too quickly, which makes sense because all these laptop features depend on the CPU.
Investigating these problems revealed that Nvidia Display Container Service caused them.
So what exactly Display Container Service does, and why is it even using your CPU? An Nvidia official explained that this service handles some display tasks, including GeForce Experience features and showing the icon in your notification area.
However, Display Container Service isn’t that important, so if you end the service using Task Manager, GeForce Experience and Nvidia’s notification will still work. Users discovered that Nvidia changed its Display Container service in the latest driver update, which resulted in an unexpected CPU usage spike.
It is worth noting that not all users would run into these performance issues.
Nvidia is preparing emergency hotfix for high CPU usage
Nvidia officially acknowledged the problem and told us it plans to publish the emergency hotfix in the next several hours. Given that the bug is frustrating and can make your Windows 10 or 11 hardware run slower than usual, you can try rolling back to the previous version of the chipmaker’s drivers.
Given the statement we received and what has been communicated to users, it’s very likely that the issue will be patched soon. Users can now try ending the service process in Windows 11’s Task Manager. If you’re on Windows 11 Moment 2, you can use Task Manager’s search bar to find the particular process and end its task.
For example, you can try following these steps:
- Open an Administrative Command Prompt (cmd.exe)
- Stop the NVDisplay.Container service
- Delete _NvGSTPlugin.dll
- Restart NVDisplay.Container service
However, this hasn’t worked for all users and rolling back to an older version of the GeForce driver seems the best option for now.
