Over the weekend, forums around the Internet exploded with news of Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 3080 crashing in games for some users, followed by (very informed) speculation by Igor Wallossek at Igor’s Lab that part of the issue could by caused by the capacitors used on various custom boards.
Read our explainer on the GeForce RTX 3080 crashing issues if you want to know more.
On Monday morning, Nvidia released new GeForce Game Ready drivers that appear to fix the stability issues.
I have a custom GeForce RTX 3080 brimming with an all-POSCAP capacitor configuration that reliably crashed in Horizon Zero Dawn with the older, original 456.38 drivers.
The new 456.55 Game Ready drivers indeed puts an end to that, but it looks like it does so by slightly limiting the maximum GPU Boost clock speed.
The EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 cards you can buy include different capacitors than my pre-production version; you can see it includes MLCC arrays between the black, rectangular POSCAPs on the rear of the GPU.
It took almost a week of R&D effort to find the cause and reduce the POSCAPs to 4 and add 20 MLCC caps prior to shipping production boards, this is why the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 series was delayed at launch.
There were no 6 POSCAP production EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 boards shipped.
To be absolutely clear in case you missed it: EVGA is not shipping FTW3 cards with an all-POSCAP setup, which couldn’t pass real-world testing.
On the all-POSCAP FTW3, using Nvidia’s original 456.38 drivers, the Horizon Zero Dawn benchmark consistently crashes at 1440p resolution on our test system.
After that, I ran the fantastic Display Driver Uninstaller software to wipe Nvidia’s 456.38 drivers from my system, and installed the new 456.55 drivers with promised stability fixes.
I’ve rerun the benchmark five times with the 456.55 drivers installed and successfully completed every run.
Because EVGA caught the issue early, this does not affect FTW3 cards on store shelves
We’ll need to do more testing to see if the new sub-2GHz limit imposed in HZD with the 456.55 drivers carries over to other scenarios, to determine if this change affects the very topmost performance in the very fastest custom RTX 3080 models out there
But for now, if you’ve been lucky enough to score a GeForce RTX 3080 or 3090, but unlucky enough to get one that suffers from crashes, go download Nvidia’s Game Ready 456.55 drivers pronto
If our experiences with HZD is any indication, it could be the fix for what ails you. Update: Users of the r/nvidia subreddit report an end to crashing with their RTX 3080 cards in various games, too
Stay tuned for our full review of the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 (with MLCC installed) in the days to come
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