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Is your Nvidia RTX 3080 freezing? The company released a new software driver for the graphics card amid reports from users that certain third-party designs for the product will cause PC games to shut down abruptly.
According to Nvidia, the new 456.55 Game Ready driver should “improve stability” for the RTX 3000 series cards, which were released earlier this month. However, the company is not really diving into the controversy over whether certain OEM designs for GPUs are prone to failure when the boost clock speed exceeds 2.0 GHz.
“With regard to partner board designs, our partners regularly customize their designs and we work closely with them in the process,” the company told PCMag in a statement without elaborating.
Stability issues have been popping up in user forums for days, and affected PC owners say they own RTX 3080 models from vendors like MSI and Zotac. The card is supposed to operate at a base clock speed of 1.4 GHz. However, the increase in clock speed can be as high as 1.7 GHz or higher depending on the model and how overclocking is configured.
Then over the weekend, graphics card maker EVGA shed some light on the situation; The company revealed that the RTX 3080 may not pass real-world test conditions using a certain design configuration. Specifically, the vendor pointed to the graphics card’s capacitors, which are used to store energy.
The settings for all POSCAPs are at the bottom. The model with the MLCCs is at the top. (Credit: EVGA)
EVGA found that using six solid conductive polymer tantalum capacitors (POSCAP) with the RTX 3080 could cause errors. So to address the issues, the company incorporated several multilayer ceramic chip capacitors (MLCCs) into the final design.
“It took almost a week of R&D effort to find the cause and reduce the POSCAPs to 4 and add 20 MLCC limits before shipping the production boards,” EVGA wrote in the company’s forum post on Saturday. “This is why the EVGA GeForce RTX 3080 FTW3 series was delayed at launch.”
The company added that it never shipped any RTX 3080 FTW3 models with the six POSCAP configuration to actual consumers. All that said, the capacitor issue may not explain all the issues with Nvidia’s new graphics cards. A user on the official Nvidia forum wrote that they encountered crash issues when using an EVGA RTX 3080 XC model.
Concerns about capacitors were also raised by PC review site Igor’s Lab, which noted that Nvidia’s own Founders Edition RTX 3080 cards do not appear to suffer from the problem, possibly because the product uses MLCC capacitors. Meanwhile, other third-party vendor cards have no or very few MLCCs, causing consumers to worry that OEM manufacturers’ RTX 3080s are an inferior product.
For now, Nvidia is silent on whether the capacitor configuration is the source of the errors. But he noted, “The appropriate number of POSCAP vs. MLCC clusters can vary by design and is not necessarily indicative of quality.”
Meanwhile, there is evidence showing that Nvidia’s new driver slows down the clock speeds of the RTX 3080, which will likely compensate for the hang-up issues. PCWorld tested the driver and found that it limited an EVGA RTX 3080 card to a maximum boost speed of just under 2.0 GHz.
We reached out to Asus, MSI, and Zotac about stability issues and will update the story if we hear back. We also plan to test third-party RTX 3080 cards for performance issues and glitches, so stay tuned for our reviews.
