After a long month of waiting, Windows 11 Canary builds finally returned in October. However, in addition to adding some new features and fixes, the latest releases brought new known bugs and some pretty serious issues. Microsoft has just issued a notification that Windows Insiders with older Nvidia graphics cards will experience black screens, hangs, and other nastiness in Windows 11 build 27723.
Here is what Microsoft added to the release notes for build 27723:
[ADDED 10/10] Some Insiders with PCs that have older NVIDIA GPUs (like the GTX 970, Quadro K620, etc.) are experiencing some issues where their displays appear stuck at a black screen and unresponsive or seeing their GPUs showing errors in Device Manager and not working correctly.
Unfortunately, there are no workarounds at this moment. If your system is affected, the only way to get out of the loop is to roll back to the previous build. To do so, Microsoft recommends booting into Windows Recovery (WinRE) and uninstalling build 27723 using troubleshooting tools. Once back to the previous release, make sure to go to Settings > Windows Update and pause updates to prevent Windows 11 from downloading build 27723 again.
Microsoft says it is working on resolving the problem, so a fix should be available in future updates (there is no ETA, sadly). Other bugs in build 27723 include update error 0xc190010, rollbacks when updating, game crashes on launch, biometric issues on Copilot+ PCs, and more.
Speaking of old Nvidia graphics cards, bugs in Windows 11 build 27723 are not the only thing that could nag users to look for a newer GPU. OBS Studio 31 Beta 1 is out, and it no longer supports Nvidia Encoder (NVENC) on Kepler-based graphics cards (GTX 600 and GTX 700 Series). You can learn more about that here.