NVIDIA released Linux x64 Display Driver 595.71.05 on April 28, 2026, targeting a specific and disruptive bug affecting Wayland users. The driver weighs in at 423 MB and is available now for 64-bit Linux systems. If you run NVIDIA hardware on Wayland, this one is worth installing promptly.
The bug is straightforward to describe and genuinely frustrating to experience.
On systems running Wayland with an NVIDIA GPU, suspending and resuming the machine left OpenGL applications with a completely black rendering surface. The application itself remained alive, the window was present, and the rest of the desktop continued functioning.
But any application relying on OpenGL for its output, including creative tools like Blender, Krita, or DaVinci Resolve, displayed nothing. The only practical workaround before this fix was logging out and back in, or restarting the compositor entirely.
The root cause sits in how the driver handled framebuffer mappings during a power state transition. When the system entered suspend, the driver correctly released GPU resources.
On resume, however, the framebuffer mappings were not fully restored before OpenGL contexts attempted to render again. The result was a broken rendering pipeline that the application had no way to detect or recover from on its own. Version 595.71.05 forces a proper restoration sequence during resume, bringing the OpenGL stack back into a valid state before any application rendering takes place.
This kind of suspend-resume regression has appeared across multiple NVIDIA driver branches over the past few years. Power state transitions are genuinely complex on modern GPU hardware, particularly with the DRM kernel subsystem involved.
Each new driver generation, new kernel release, and new display protocol combination creates fresh opportunities for these interactions to go wrong. Wayland’s architecture handles GPU resource management differently from X11, which is part of why this category of bug tends to surface on Wayland sessions first.
Outside of the Wayland fix, this release carries routine stability improvements and minor Vulkan compatibility updates for newer hardware generations. NVIDIA’s release notes do not detail any meaningful performance changes or new feature additions beyond these items.
Users running headless servers, pure compute workloads, or X11 desktop sessions have no functional reason to prioritise this update. For those users, the next regularly scheduled driver release will be the more relevant one.
For Wayland users on GNOME, KDE Plasma, or any other compositor, the priority is higher. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Fedora 44, and other recently released distributions are all shipping with Wayland as the default session.
The installed base of Linux users running NVIDIA hardware on Wayland has grown substantially over the past twelve months. An OpenGL blackout after every suspend cycle is not a minor inconvenience on those systems.
Installation through a distribution package manager handles everything automatically on most systems. Users on Ubuntu can expect the update through the standard apt upgrade path once the package lands in the repository.
Fedora users can pull it through dnf. Those installing manually from the NVIDIA runfile should ensure existing kernel modules are cleanly removed before running the new installer, as leftover module files from a previous version can cause conflicts during boot. Verifying the installed version after reboot with the nvidia-smi command confirms the new driver loaded correctly.
The full driver details and download link are available on the official NVIDIA driver page for version 595.71.05.
