Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series graphics cards, including the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, have been the talk of the town, selling out rapidly upon release. While reviews of these cards pointed to a few notable flaws — especially with the RTX 5080 — those who managed to snag one were undoubtedly excited to get their hands on the latest tech. Unfortunately, some early buyers are now facing a serious issue: instability.
Reports from Tom’s Hardware indicate that some RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 cards are being “bricked”, rendering them completely unusable. These issues seem to stem from recent driver and BIOS updates, particularly Nvidia’s latest driver update which introduced DLSS 4 features. Users have reported GPU initialization failures, black screens, and PCIe 5.0 instability, making it impossible for the cards to boot when operating in PCIe 5.0 mode. Some users have been able to roll back the drivers to fix the issue, but others have found their cards no longer recognized by their motherboards or Windows, making rollbacks impossible.
These problems appear to be affecting both Founder’s Editions and AIB partner variants, including the RTX 5090D exclusive to China. While the majority of complaints seem to focus on the RTX 5090, a Reddit user did report an issue with the RTX 5080, which only worked in PCIe 2.0 mode after the update.
Many speculate that these issues could’ve been avoided if Nvidia and its partners had more time to prepare the necessary drivers. As Roman “8auer” Hartung pointed out in his analysis, some manufacturers had less than a week to prepare, a timeline that many consider far too tight for such a high-profile release.
Nvidia has yet to comment on these issues, so it’s unclear whether they are due to incompatibility or user error. If you’re affected, rolling back the driver might help, but if your card is damaged, you’ll likely need to request an RMA. Given the current stock shortages and resupply delays of up to 16 weeks, a quick replacement may not be in the cards for those dealing with bricked GPUs.
