Tuesday, February 11th 2025
NVIDIA Investigating Reported GeForce RTX 5090 & 5080 Black Screen & Stability Issues
Unlucky owners of problematic GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 graphics cards have posted feedback across various online community sites. Press outlets started to take notice of these documented issues soon after the launch of NVIDIA's debut wave of "Blackwell" GPUs. PC Gamer has "kept track" of reports relating to black screens and miscellaneous failures—the site published an investigative article late last week, following user feedback "hitting critical mass" across Reddit and Team Green's own forum. A request for comment was sent over to NVIDIA HQ; PC Gamer received a brief response. A company spokesperson confirmed that their team is: "investigating the reported issues with the RTX 50-series."
Several PC hardware community members have documented their troubleshooting experiences—the most common suggestion involves downshifting from a PCIe 5.0 connection to 4.0, on the PEG-16 graphics port. Unfortunately, this step did not resolve black screen issues for certain owners—a member of the buildapc subreddit explored a wide array of troubleshooting channels. They re-installed Windows 11 (23H2), adjusted BIOS settings, experimented with monitor connections, and played around with drivers. Best results were produced by connecting a single monitor to their MSI GeForce RTX 5090 GAMING TRIO OC's DisplayPort, with nothing else hooked up to the other ports (DP and HDMI). They suspect that Team Green's GPU drivers could be the source of frustrations; corroborated by a recent VideoCardz news piece. In addition, the 572.16 driver is reportedly affecting "certain GeForce RTX 40-series." A smaller number of owners have discussed a "bricking" of cards; VideoCardz believes that China-exclusive GeForce RTX 5090D models are suffering the most. Manli will be analyzing a "bricked" unit at its service center, in the near future. Colorful did not reply with a comment on the situation.
Skip to the 10-minute 30-second mark to watch the segment covering "GeForce RTX 50-series GPUs Encountering Stability Issues."
Gamers Nexus has asked its audience to voluntarily send in problematic cards, for investigative purposes.
Sources:
PC Gamer, VideoCardz, Build a PC Subreddit, Guru3D
Several PC hardware community members have documented their troubleshooting experiences—the most common suggestion involves downshifting from a PCIe 5.0 connection to 4.0, on the PEG-16 graphics port. Unfortunately, this step did not resolve black screen issues for certain owners—a member of the buildapc subreddit explored a wide array of troubleshooting channels. They re-installed Windows 11 (23H2), adjusted BIOS settings, experimented with monitor connections, and played around with drivers. Best results were produced by connecting a single monitor to their MSI GeForce RTX 5090 GAMING TRIO OC's DisplayPort, with nothing else hooked up to the other ports (DP and HDMI). They suspect that Team Green's GPU drivers could be the source of frustrations; corroborated by a recent VideoCardz news piece. In addition, the 572.16 driver is reportedly affecting "certain GeForce RTX 40-series." A smaller number of owners have discussed a "bricking" of cards; VideoCardz believes that China-exclusive GeForce RTX 5090D models are suffering the most. Manli will be analyzing a "bricked" unit at its service center, in the near future. Colorful did not reply with a comment on the situation.
Gamers Nexus has asked its audience to voluntarily send in problematic cards, for investigative purposes.
20 Comments on NVIDIA Investigating Reported GeForce RTX 5090 & 5080 Black Screen & Stability Issues
Nvidia RTX50 with MFG - Multi Flame Generation
:)
GN was among the first ones on the "user error" bandwagon with that 4090 BS & is still riding on that pony!
This is starting to look more like a recall, at least for the 5090 FE. People will probably stop buying 5090's unless this thing gets settled.
ATI had the same poor driver mentality long ago but no more under AMD. It’s time to start holding Nvidia accountable for these problems.
From what i've gathered so far, either GPU makers need to stop cheaping out, or PSU makers need to rework the 12V-2x6 circuitry. Atleast one of the devices needs to know what's happening with each of the six 12V cables.
As I said before, you can't build brand loyalty if the customers can't enjoy your product. Even apple was forced to correct their blunders (Mac Pro 2013, butterfly keyboard, removing mag safe, removing ports on the MacBooks pro, GPGPU being straight up dysfunctional on MacOS X...). Loyal customers can forgive occasional blunders, but there's not a single company in the world that managed to survive on a culture of constant mediocrity with products that are straight up not working.
also, this was with 450W. With 575W 5090 new problems, different potentially from what we saw, may appear.
We’ll see how it evolves and how Nvidia responds should the issue becomes bigger
As Buildzoid pointed out, you can have a cable with all but one wire working and the card will run the entire wattage through that single wire until the connectors melt. This is probably why this issue has been so hard to pin down, because any number of conditions can impact that resistance between the pins and thus change which path the electricity prefers. It's a ticking time-bomb for existing users and luck of the draw for others. A single defect in the cable and there goes $1,500 - $2,000.
They need to recall all cards with this connector, this is such a massive oversight.