NVIDIA's New Driver Offers A Preliminary Fix While AIBs Evaluate Their Custom Designs With The First NVIDIA Test Drivers
There have also been reports that users are facing fewer issues after installing the new GeForce 456.55 drivers compared to the older ones on the same cards. Users have stated that their cards run at lower clock speeds but are more stable and don't spike as often and as high as they were before. So if you were one of the users facing crashes or issues with the cards, you can try out the new drivers. The cards we were running (MSI RTX 3080 / RTX 3090 Gaming X Trio) didn't produce any issues while our tests before and the new drivers hardly impact the clock speeds of the cards.
Some users have also manually undervolted/underclocked their cards for a more stable experience while gaming. Undervolting is only possible through the MSI Afterburner 4.6.3 BETA 2 utility which can be found here for download. It is also advised to users who are facing these issues to reinstall a fresh set of drivers.
With that said, AIBs have confirmed to me that they are indeed working with the first test drivers from NVIDIA. The 456.55 release doesn't specifically state any fixes for the issues and only adds in fixes for a certain number of games. NVIDIA might have introduced a preliminary measure to halt the crashes for now but a more fine-tuned approach in the form of a driver is still a couple of days away. We will keep you posted within this article for any more information we get related to the RTX 30 series issues.
So there you have it: Drivers Matter™. We suspected there was a good chance Nvidia could implement fixes without the need for firmware updates or hardware recalls. At the same time, the 456.55 drivers certainly aren't the end of the road. Nvidia will continue to tweak and tune its drivers, and there are probably still cards and/or games that have issues. As we noted earlier, higher factory overclocks often seem to be the main culprit, so if you do have an RTX 3080 or RTX 3090 that still isn't running fully stable, and you're not ready to return the card, try using MSI Afterburner, EVGA Precision X1, or a similar utility to drop the GPU clocks by 20-50 MHz. That might be all that's required to go from frustrating crashes to stable high-end gaming bliss.
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