Nvidia’s newest RTX 50-series graphics cards have been hot, hot, hot, selling out within minutes upon launch. And though our reviews of the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 spotted some big flaws, especially in the former, no doubt anyone who managed to get their hands on one is thrilled.
Except some early buyers are now reporting serious instability issues with both. Not what you want to hear after dropping thousands on a card…
Some RTX 5080 and 5090 cards are being rendered completely unusable due to driver and BIOS problems, reports Tom’s Hardware. These “bricked” cards affect Founder’s Editions and AIB partner variants, including the China-exclusive RTX 5090D.
50-series GPUs dead after driver update
Though the root cause of these bricked cards is still undetermined, most of the reports point to issues occurring after installing Nvidia’s latest drivers from just a few days ago, which brought new DLSS 4 features to new and older GPUs alike.
The driver update appears to cause GPU initialization failures, black screens, and PCIe 5.0 instability (i.e., the GPU won’t boot while in PCIe 5.0 mode). Some users say that rolling back the drivers fixes their issues, but the update is causing some cards to no longer be recognized by motherboards and/or Windows, making rollbacks impossible.
The issues primarily appear to affect RTX 5090 cards and don’t seem to be related to any particular manufacturer. One Reddit user also reported an issue with their RTX 5080, though, which only worked in PCIe 2.0 mode after installing the latest drivers.
We suspect this instability could’ve been avoided if manufacturers had more time to prepare before releasing their cards. As Roman “8auer” Hartung explains in his video on the RTX 5090 release debacle, some companies apparently had less than a week to prepare the appropriate drivers. That’s far too tight a timeline for such an important release, especially for high-end cards as expensive as these.
What now?
Nvidia hasn’t yet addressed these alleged problems with RTX 5090 and 5080 cards, so we don’t know for sure what the issues truly are and whether they’re due to incompatibilities or user errors (e.g., the use of the wrong motherboard).
In any case, if you’re affected by these problems, you might try rolling back your drivers to see if that fixes things. Otherwise, contact Nvidia support and wait for new driver updates before attempting any experimental solutions. In the case of a permanently damaged card, you’ll have to request an RMA.
Of course, with RTX 50-series cards out of stock everywhere and up to 16 weeks for the resupply, you probably won’t be getting a replacement anytime soon. We’ll know more in the coming days.