After the March driver update, some Windows 11 and 10 users experienced high CPU usage on their Nvidia systems. The chipmaker confirmed the high CPU usage issue and told us that it would be fixed in the coming hours with the upcoming emergency hotfix.
Nvidia officials confirmed that a software fix had been developed for GeForce driver version 531.18 and would arrive within hours. According to reports on Reddita bug in GeForce Driver version 531.18, which was released on February 28 and widely installed by users in March, appears to be causing high CPU usage
Users report that the driver causes Nvidia’s Display Container Service service to use up to 15 percent of their CPUs. This issue reportedly makes their laptops hot and leads to performance issues and batteries draining too quickly, which makes sense since all these laptop features rely on the CPU.
Investigation of these issues revealed that Nvidia Display Container Service was causing them.
So what exactly does Display Container Service do 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 system tray.
Display Container Service isn’t that important though, so if you end the service using the 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, resulting in an unexpected spike in CPU usage.
It is worth noting that not all users would encounter these performance issues.
Nvidia is preparing emergency hotfix for high CPU usage
Nvidia has officially acknowledged the issue and told us it plans to release the emergency hotfix in the next few hours. Since the bug is frustrating and can cause your Windows 10 or 11 hardware to run slower than usual, 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 is very likely that the issue will be fixed soon. Users can now try to end the service process in the Windows 11 Task Manager. If you are using Windows 11 Moment 2, you can use the Task Manager’s search bar to find the specific process and end the task.
For example, you can try following these steps:
- Open an administrative command prompt (cmd.exe)
- Stop the NVDisplay.Container service
- Remove _NvGSTplugin.dll
- Restart the NVDisplay.Container service
However, this hasn’t worked for all users and rolling back to an older version of the GeForce driver seems to be the best option for now.
