Well, this is a new one for me. I've been playing Star Citizen since May, and I installed these drivers on 2 December 2021. On 12 December 2021, after exiting out of SC and reopening the game very shortly after, I started getting a 15008 could not sync character data error.
Several days of troubleshooting later, it turns out that these drivers were the culprit. I did a clean install of the last standard (non-DCH) driver that Nvidia will "ever" release - 472.12 - and that error, along with the almost 5 minute black screen, is now gone.
Likely something became corrupted in the driver, and a clean intall fixed it. Never had this problem until I swapped to DCH drivers (coincidentally, it was with the driver right before 497.09, which I upgraded to 497.09 days later). "There's no difference between DCH and Standard drivers" (per Nvidia) my tuchuss.
post edited by arestavo - Wednesday, December 15, 2021 3:19 PM