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No, it's the behavior of malfunctioning hardware. The new drivers happen to trigger the malfunction in a different way.

except the hardware wasn't malfunctioning, the article says he flashed the gpu firmware and all issues were resolved.

That might have disabled the malfunctioning part or otherwise worked around it. If it's merely a firmware issue, everyone would have that problem.

Besides, some people in the referenced Apple discussions thread report that even after flashing the firmware, the problems continue.