GeForce RTX 3080 owners on ComputerBase, LinusTechTips, Overclockers.co.uk, and other communities are voicing their concerns about a potential issue with green team’s flagship graphics card. There are increasing reports of games crashing back to the desktop whenever the GPU exceeds clock rates of 2.0 GHz.
At least a handful of games and SKUs (e.g., EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 XC3 GAMING, MSI GeForce RTX 3080 VENTUS 3X 10G OC, ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity) appear to be affected. It isn’t clear just how widespread this issue is, but users have confirmed that their cards haven’t been overclocked. The appropriate power supplies are also being used (i.e., 750 watt or better).
“So i recently recieved my MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ventus 3X OC and i’m getting crashing problems with it,” wrote Alex J on Overclockers UK. “So basically when im in game within the first few seconds of playing it crashes (not Blue screen crashes out of the game) and i believe the problem is the factory overclock is too high, as the core clock speed boosts all the way up to 2010Mhz in game and as soon as it reaches that speed it crashes. It does this in all games. The only way i can fix this problem is by downclocking the core clock in msi after burner.”
“Tried playing Batman Arkham Knight, played for maybe 20 mins before it crashed (Zotac 3080 Trinity),” wrote Elcid_888 on Linus Tech Tips. “Not sure what the deal is. Due to all the reports of the same exact issue, I’m going to assume this is most definitely driver related. My psu is 850w 80+ certified evga, so no problems there. Also, if it was a bad card, I would expect to have other issues. There is no artifacts, temps are perfectly fine, etc., Ill look at event viewer and see what it’s reporting.”
“I recently picked up EVGA’s RTX 3080 XC card and have been experiencing hitching and crashing across multiple titles including the hyper-optimized Doom: Eternal which never as much hiccuped in my multi-campaign playthrough with a GTX 1080,” wrote inkuplex on NVIDIA’s official forum. “This isn’t first new GPU rodeo but please focus on releasing a more stable driver soon. It’s not fun upgrading hardware and losing ability to ever really use it.”
“Titles that have unusual hitching or crashes to desktop for me are Divinity Original Sin 2, Metro Exodus, Doom Eternal, Kingdom Come: Deliverance, and Endless Space 2. I use Guru3D DDU utility to uninstall my previous cards driver before installing this one so as far as I’m aware it should have been a clean install.”
Users insist that this is a driver-related issue. We’re hoping that NVIDIA has a solution soon, but for an immediate fix, GeForce RTX 3080 owners can try downclocking the GPU with software such as MSI Afterburner.