NVIDIA finally published its first official statement on its support forum yesterday regarding the problematic configuration of six POSCAP (SP-CAP) capacitors used in the GPU power subsystem on GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090. Recall that owners of cards with this set of capacitors more often than others, they encounter a crash of games when the graphics chip exceeds the frequency of 2000 MHz.

“NVIDIA has released a new driver that improves stability. As for non-reference cards, our partners often change the characteristics of their printed circuit boards, and we work closely with them in this. The number of POSCAP and MLCC capacitors may vary depending on the design chosen by the manufacturer and does not necessarily indicate the quality of the product, ”commented NVIDIA.

Be that as it may, but many owners of GeForce RTX 3080 video cards on the social site Reddit note that “crashes” from games after installing the 456.55 drivers really stopped. For example, a user under the nickname Ifaliacy reported that he tested the stability of his video card after installing a new driver in the games Horizon Zero Dawn and COD Warzone. He did not encounter “crashes”, although earlier his card was distinguished by extremely unstable operation even at nominal frequencies. Another user reported that before installing the new NVIDIA driver, his MSI GeForce RTX 3080 Ventus graphics card was unstable in Forza 4. But now the crashes have passed in this game as well. There are a lot of similar comments in the community, so it looks like the problem has been solved to one degree or another.

This was confirmed by professional observers. PC World editor-in-chief Brad Chacos said that his test sample of the GeForce RTX 3080 from EVGA is equipped with just a problematic configuration of six POSCAP capacitors. This card has not yet gone on sale, as the manufacturer decided to replace the capacitors, but a certain number of such cards have been leaked to the press. According to Chakos, in Horizon Zero Dawn, this map really worked very badly: “crashes” happened every now and then.

Installing the NVIDIA driver version 456.55 corrected the situation. The game is now really stable.

However, one nuance emerged. With the previous driver, the graphics chip clocked at 2010 MHz, and there were no problems. They began when the frequency reached the 2025 MHz bar. It was at this moment that the game crashed. After updating the driver, the video card started working in games in the frequency range 1980-1995 MHz. And only in the main menu of Horizon Zero Dawn the frequency can be increased to the initially stable 2010 MHz. Chakos concludes that the new NVIDIA driver uses a modified algorithm for proprietary GPU Boost technology, which has adjusted the voltage values, as well as the maximum automatic GPU overclocking limit for the new GeForce RTX 3080 and RTX 3090 video cards.