Early GeForce RTX 3080 owners run into crashes and notorious black screens in games

Out of nowhere, the first owners of the high-end GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card have begun reporting serious crashes during gameplay. This is clearly not an isolated issue, as reports of RTX 3080 instability are flooding most tech forums, including Computerbase, LinusTechTips, OCUK, and even NVIDIA's official forums.

Gamers are reporting black screens that freeze their PCs completely. AMD's Radeon RX 5700/5700 XT graphics cards suffered from a similar issue back in the day, which Team Red eventually fixed in a subsequent driver update.

However, investigations suggest this issue only affects custom partner versions of the GeForce RTX 3080, leaving NVIDIA's official Founders Edition untouched. On top of that, it looks like a software issue rather than a hardware defect: some graphics cards apparently have poorly configured voltage-frequency curves.

While there is no official fix yet, Computerbase reports that affected users can try slightly undervolting the GeForce RTX 3080 GPU, or simply downclocking it by 50–100 MHz (which is much easier and safer).

To undervolt your GeForce RTX 3080, you will need MSI Afterburner 4.6.3 BETA 2 or newer, which you can download via this link from the official MSI website. Additionally, affected RTX 3080 owners should try either reinstalling their current drivers or updating to the latest release.

You can do this using the handy DisplayDriverUninstaller utility, which wipes all traces of your current drivers to allow a clean installation. If you prefer not to use third-party software, you can also select the "Clean installation" option in the GeForce driver installer, which works similarly.

Source: WccfTech