The release of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3080 hasn’t been one of the smoothest with stock delays, but things have got worse with stability issues for custom models. Nvidia’s hoping to have solved that with some pivotal tweaks.
In the last few days, there have been growing numbers of reports of stability issues with some GeForce RTX 3080 cards – something no one is going to be happy with. Some of this has been put down to hardware issues such as EVGA’s statement which suggested that a certain type of capacitor was responsible for the increasing number of crashes for many users. A forum post from the manufacturer explained what was involved in its mass production QC testing and how it reckons it may have led to such issues. An article by Igor’s Lab went onto decipher it all by pointing out that much of the problem could be to do with the mixture of POSCAP and MLCC capacitors on the rear of the PCB underneath the GPU die. In layman’s terms, they’re simply not stable enough.
MSI has also seemingly acknowledged that issue, silently revising the design on its GeForce RTX 3080 according to VideoCardz.
However, while that sounds like a straightforward solution, it’s not the full story. There have still been reported issues with other cards that offer different capacitor arrangements.
Notably, Nvidia has just released a new driver for the 30-series that sets to improve stability. Alongside doing so, it announced via a forum post that “regarding partner board designs, our partners regularly customise their designs and we work closely with them in the process. The appropriate number of POSCAP vs. MLCC groupings can vary depending on the design and is not necessarily indicative of quality.”
Via the release notes – Game Ready Driver 456.55 – doesn’t actually offer much insight into how it’ll increase stability for the graphics cards other than saying it does so. Instead it focuses on mentioning the addition of Nvidia Reflex support for Call of Duty: Warzone and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. It’s also geared up ready for the launch of Star Wars: Squadron shortly.
Still, hopefully it’ll solve a lot of users’ issues while manufacturers potentially work on a design tweak or two.