Corsair iCUE eating your CPU alive? NVIDIA’s new GPU driver has a nasty …

NVIDIA's latest Game Ready Driver comes with the usual features, including support for some major new PC games - Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is one of them - but it packs a sting in the tail for those with Corsair peripherals that sport RGB lighting.

Mainly because NVIDIA's driver v566.03 has a conflict with Corsair's iCUE tool, used for controlling its RGB lighting (and other functionality besides).

Tom's Hardware pointed out the problem (acknowledged by Corsair as you can see above, in its post on X) whereby CPU usage is spiking not just with iCUE, but also Bluestacks, the popular Android emulator for PC.

NVIDIA's release notes for the v566.03 driver inform us:

"[Bluestacks/Corsair iCUE] May display higher than normal CPU usage [4895184][4893446]."

What isn't said here is whether this is the fault of NVIDIA (a change in the driver), or the iCUE app - but considering it's also happening in Bluestacks too, we can presume the fault lies in the Game Ready Driver. (Correct us if we're wrong, Team Green).

Another slight wrinkle here is that the language used by NVIDIA is that these software clients may 'display' higher than normal levels of CPU activity, which suggests to us that the bug might be showing excessive processor spiking (rather than this actually happening with the chip, if you see what we mean).

However, going by the reports we've seen on Reddit, the CPU is indeed being run hard by the bug. One Redditor noted:

"Hope they can fix this soon I've been using Bluestacks for years and it's weird running it now with CPU temp & fan rpms being ramped up much higher than usual (13600K)."

That's in the thread for the new driver in NVIDIA's Subreddit, where there are a number of complaints about this problem.

Another Redditor notes that it isn't the first time that iCUE has caused excessive CPU usage, interestingly.

At the moment, those with iCUE are being advised to roll back their NVIDIA drivers for now, and Corsair has mentioned v561.09 is the previous release to revert to, apparently, while it investigates the bug.

If you haven't yet upgraded your graphics driver, it may just be prudent to hold off for now if you have iCUE or Bluestacks on your PC.

There is, however, a glimmer of hope in the form a couple of potential workarounds that are offered on Reddit.

The first (these come from Redditor 'The15thDoctors') is to rename the executable QmlRenderer.exe (related to the Murals feature) to QmlRenderer.exe.old. Or alternatively you could just try disabling Murals, which is another suggestion elsewhere.

The other possible fudge mentioned is to lower 'Set LCD Frame Rate' in the AIO settings in iCUE, which should hopefully see the CPU usage return to normal. It's definitely worth trying these to see if they work for your rig, while NVIDIA and Corsair are hopefully cooking up a solution.

NVIDIA's v566.03 driver delivers optimal performance for Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 as mentioned, plus Alan Wake 2: The Lake House, Dragon Age: The Veilguard, Horizon Zero Dawn Remastered, No More Room In Hell 2, Red Dead Redemption, and The Axis Unseen. The RDR and Horizon Zero Dawn remasters are getting DLSS 3 frame generation, too.

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Corsair iCUE eating your CPU alive? NVIDIA's new GPU driver has a nasty ...