Nvidia’s New GPUs Are Bricking for No Reason

2021 has been quite eventful for Nvidia, with the debut of DeepSeek, a Chinese startup’s AI project, causing a dip in its stock market value a few weeks back. Following this, they’ve unveiled their upcoming Nvidia GeForce RTX 50-series models, known for their superior graphics quality and remarkable speed due to AI support. Despite enhancing their influence in the cloud gaming and tech industry, the introduction of the latest RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 GPU chips has led to a pricier hurdle, as users have reported these new chips to cause hardware failures or “bricking.

As a gamer, I’ve come across a term in tech circles known as “bricking,” which essentially means my high-end gaming equipment has turned into an expensive paperweight because it’s no longer functioning. It’s frustrating to know that despite the hefty price tag (anywhere from $1,000 to $2,000), my brand new Nvidia GPU cards are being reported as undetectable by the system. This leaves me with a device that’s as useful as a brick on my desk. While there have been instances where this issue can be resolved, it often seems like these products are permanently broken for some users.

On January 30, 2025, Nvidia introduced both the GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5090, each being hailed as the most powerful GeForce GPU ever built. These products offer players AI-boosted graphics, full ray tracing and neural rendering, and groundbreaking performance capabilities. As stated on the Nvidia website, the RTX 5090 delivers approximately double the performance in DLSS 4 and Ray Tracing compared to the previous RTX 4090 model. The GeForce RTX 5080 Graphics Chip, meanwhile, offers twice the performance of the RTX 4080. The main distinction between the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090 lies in their respective Nvidia Architectures: Blackwell and Ada Lovelace.

Regarding the increasing reports of GPU bricking concerns with the new RTX 50 series, it seems only a handful of users are able to use these chips without encountering problems. The influx of complaints has been so significant that Nvidia has responded by acknowledging they are currently investigating these reported issues, as stated to PC Gamer.

Based on PC Gamer’s report, it appears that the recently launched Nvidia 572.16 driver update has been linked to some “irreversible” issues with graphics cards. It’s not unexpected for such problems to arise when something as significant as this is introduced to the market. The exact number of reports regarding the RTX 5080 and 5090 cards bricking isn’t known, but it seems to have caught Nvidia’s attention, even if just briefly. It’s also been stated that these RTX 5080 issues don’t seem to be related to the hardware stability or Nvidia Architecture. We can anticipate that Nvidia might release a blog post about this matter in the coming days.

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2025-02-09 06:39