Nvidia’s RTX 3080 has got off to a shaky start. Not only is the GPU out of stock everywhere, but now those who managed to get their hands on one are complaining of crashes during gaming.
Nvidia’s Founders Edition cards seem to be in the clear, as ComputerBase reports that the issue appears to be affecting custom variants of the RTX 3080. This includes the Zotac GeForce RTX 3080 Trinity, the EVGA RTX 3080 XC, and the MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ventus 3X OC – all of which have been overclocked by their respective manufacturers.
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According to various forum threads and social media posts, the GPUs are crashing to desktop (CTD), which sees a game freezing or crashing before returning to the desktop. Some users have also reported black screens, commonly associated with CTDs.
The cause of the CTD issues remain a mystery, though many are suggesting that the problem occurs when the graphics card exceeds boost clock speeds of 2.0GHz.
There’s no official fix as of yet either, although some are recommending manually reducing the clock speeds by up to 100MHz and disabling Hardware-accelerated GPU planning in Windows 10 alleviates the issue as a temporary solution.
Some are also recommending under-volting the RTX 3080, though this is only possible through the MSI Afterburner 4.6.3 BETA 2 utility.
Nvidia, nor its board partners, have yet to provide an official response, and it remains to be seen whether Nvidia RTX 3090 and RTX 3070 graphics cards are also affected by the glitch.
