I’ve been tracking reports of issues with Nvidia’s new RTX 50 Series GPU for a while, but now it appears to be hitting a critical mass. Many owners of the new RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 cards appear to be suffering from crashes, particularly black screens, and there are also some proof reports on the “brick-built” cards. He asked Nvidia about the issue and is currently said to be “investigating issues reported on the RTX 50 series.”
As new issues arise, the current situation seems complicated. Most commonly, RTX 50 series owners report black screen issues. There are many different scenarios where this occurs. Some say that it’s happening when switching resolution or refresh rate. Others are finding a black screen hit under heavy loads, while others are associating it with a multi-monitor setup.
After that, the problem is that the hard reboot problem persists as the card is not detected in the device manager or the system BIOS, but for other users, it is possible to restore functionality before the black screen hits again. It seems to be more intermittent and intermittent. Like we said, it’s complicated.
All of this should be predicted by saying that there are few issues with previous RTX 5080 and 5090 boards. I’ve experienced some crashes when I put Alt tabs in and out of the game to access various benchmarks and capture tools, but nothing left after the reboot. Essentially, even when overclocking the RTX 5080 within silicon lifetime, I have no direct experience with these reported black screen issues.
However, there was something frustrating about the cleansing of the full driver before installation. Thinking about that idea is important. Anyway, when writing these words, the number of users reporting issues across the platform, such as Nvidia’s own forum (one of many examples here) and Reddit (Ditto, here), is a number of isolated users. It goes far beyond anecdotal events.
Similarly, whether many YouTube videos have reported or experienced direct issues is emerging now. This includes one from Jayztwocents, which provides an overview, and another video from Boosted Media that experienced and appeared to have fixed the black screen issue.
In fact, we are referred to Nvidia and are said to be “investing the issues reported on the RTX 50 series.” So you’ll need to wait for official solutions and driver hotfixes.
Anyway, to keep the long story short, it seems very likely that this issue is related to Nvidia’s latest 572.16 driver release. There are some reports of “persistent” failures on the card. But at least they appear far more isolated and could constitute a typical failure rate.
In other words, if you throw away a batch of graphics cards to the market and buyers are enthusiastically reporting their experiences, you’re going to take some breaks, either through manufacturing issues or user errors.
It is also worth noting that some owners of the RTX 40 series GPUs have also reported issues with the 572.16 driver. Therefore, these issues may not be entirely specific to the new RTX Blackwell cards.
Furthermore, especially with the RTX 5080, I don’t think the issue is related to hardware stability or GPUs running near factory wires. I managed a stable +525 MHz GPU overclocking and +1,000 MHz memory overclocking using the Founders Edition RTX 5080. That is, it runs at solid 3.1 GHz. This is a very large overclock by recent standards.
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If you are sure you have a real problem at this point, the next step is the solution. It is likely that Nvidia will outline the issue in the near future, either promising to fix it in a short period of time or to involve an update to the HotFix driver.
Until then, the best new advice to solve the problem is to wipe the driver in a DDU (display driver non-installer), and reinstall the driver. This suggests that the problem arises from some conflict with residual driver data. Going back to my previous comments, it may not be a coincidence that I ran the DDU before installing the RTX 50 Series Review Card as a daily precaution, and I have not experienced any black screen issues.
Setting the PEG-16 graphics port to PCIE Gen 4 mode is a wise short term, following reporting PCIE signaling issues on new RTX 50 GPUs, especially if the DDU wipe is not fully successful. It may be a precaution.
Anyway, if nothing else, this rather adds weight to the idea that it’s a very good idea to wipe off a complete driver before installing a new GPU.
