I’ve been skeptical about running the recommended drivers for sometime, I just haven’t bothered for over a decade.
So today with the SolidWorks warning popping up I thought lets dig a little deeper. So I run a RTX A4000 and SolidWorks recommends 581.80. I’m on 597.06 so was wondering about security, is the old driver SolidWorks recommends totally flawed or fine.
Apparently in modern systems the security of your graphic drivers should not be overlooked. It seems like the best advise is to run the newest drivers and downgrade if there is problem. So with this in mind I delved into just how many security patches there have been since the SolidWorks recommend driver.
So Gemini has come up with a basic list -
The Security Gap: 581.80 vs 597.06
Nvidia published several major Product Security Bulletins between those two releases:
- The May 2026 Bulletin: This patch alone fixed 15 separate vulnerabilities (including 9 rated High-Severity). For the modern enterprise driver line, systems running anything older than version 596.36 were left exposed to these flaws.
- The January 2026 Bulletin: Patched another batch of high-severity flaws (such as CVE-2025-33217 through CVE-2025-33220).
- The September 2026 Bulletin: Addresses a wide collection of kernel-mode and firmware flaws (like use-after-free or out-of-bounds write exploits). Your 597.06 driver already covers the vast majority of these 2026 risks.
If you roll all the way back to 581.80, you are technically stripping away roughly 20 to 30 documented security fixes that protect your machine from privilege escalation, local code execution, and data tampering.