The PC gaming community has been abuzz with talks of crashing and instability in NVIDIA’s newly launched RTX 3080 graphics cards. Early adopters have been reporting issues and outlets such as Igor’s Lab have reported on the issue, speculating that the problems could be caused by some cards having inappropriate capacitor configurations, specifically using SP-Caps (commonly, but incorrectly referenced to as POSCaps) rather than the MLCC (multi-layer, ceramic capacitor) variety. However, NVIDIA has directly addressed these concerns with its latest driver, along with a statement given to PCWorld.
Game Ready 456.55 drivers fix the issues, PCWorld Confirms.
Our friend Brad Chacos, the very talented Senior Editor at PCWorld has been able to test these new drivers, and has confirmed that, at least for him, they fix the issues. We recommend you check out his report on the matter, but the tl;dr is that the driver seems to slightly reduce maximum boost clock speeds in order to maintain stability. He tested the drivers on a pre-production sample of the EVGA RTX 3080 FTW3 that was only sent to press, as it features a capacitor layout that does not match the final design consumers are able to purchase.
NVIDIA’s Statement Regarding Capacitors
In a statement given to PCWorld, NVIDIA clarified the situation with capacitor configurations and its board partner designs, see below:
Regarding partner board designs, our partners regularly customize 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.
NVIDIA
GeForce Game Ready 456.55 Download
You can download the driver here. Or, check out the release notes below here.
Of course, we haven’t been able to independently verify these drivers fix the issues ourselves, as we do not have an RTX 3080 on hand to test, but PCWorld has done some excellent work here, and we hope to see others follow suit and confirm their results. For now, if you’re an RTX 3080 user, we obviously recommend you download and try these drivers for yourself before you return or replace your troubled card.
