Cyberpunk continues to fail unless ray tracing is enabled.
Cyberpunk continues to fail unless ray tracing is enabled.
I believe the problem might be related to NVIDIA drivers. I tried control earlier, but the same issue occurred after about two hours. Even though I thought adjusting RTX settings helped, they weren’t enabled in the save. When I reloaded, they flipped back and it crashed again within ten minutes—similar to Cyberpunk. I’ve already completed Cyberpunk (over 80 hours). With RTX off, DLS set to Quality gave me around 110 FPS on ultra at 1440p on a 2080Ti. If I turned RTX on even slightly, it crashed in 5–10 minutes with a freeze frame but the audio stayed normal and I could press alt-tab quickly. I thought it was just Cyberpunk’s general performance issues, but now I suspect a driver problem. The boost speed seems normal—sometimes around 1920 MHz at 63°C, which has been typical for this card over the past couple of years. I haven’t used RTX outside Broadcast yet. Also, I want to note I’ve never overclocked it; the boost speed is built-in and works fine without tweaks, even at 2100 MHz without adjustment.
I've tried to complicate things even more! After another half hour of gameplay following my last update, I crashed again—reloaded and crashed shortly after (with underclocking and RT turned on). This seems like a temporary fix rather than a real solution. I also notice the same issue pops up when RT is off and I'm using ShadowPlay for recording. It gets more complicated over time—recently I received BSODs that I thought were resolved after the driver was released, but they returned. Yesterday, while idle, I experienced a BSOD, boot manager crashed, and my RAID setup kept failing. Eventually, I had to remove all drives except the RAID, free up space, and reinstall Windows (including repairing files). Then I reinstalled Cyberpunk, updated the game drivers, rebooted, and luckily didn’t see any crashes during the last five hours of gameplay. This is running my 3080 at 1980MHz. I’m unsure if the problem lies with my system stability, driver issues, or something else entirely. A few things stand out—my 6700k thermal readings are elevated under heavy load, which might be a factor, but I have a new cooling solution coming tomorrow.
I recently faced a similar problem in Minecraft RTX where all textures turned black and strange colors appeared throughout the world, along with missing black or white pixels. Someone on a forum suggested underclocking fixed it. After reducing my 2070 Super by 50 MHz, the crashes stopped. I tried Fortnite to test RTX settings, but stock configurations still showed black spots in the sky. Using an undervolted setup worked perfectly. This wasn’t an issue with minecraft RTX before, but it started after a driver update. There’s strong criticism on NVIDIA forums, so I used DDU to revert back—though the problem remained with the latest driver (resolved to 452.06). I still have the issue and worry about Cyberpunk too. I once had a driver failure in August; DDU didn’t help, so I had to reinstall Windows and install an older driver. I’m hesitant to reinstall Windows just for this, especially since it only affected RTX. I’m unsure if a new driver will solve it, but I’m hoping for a stable release soon. Or I might need a clean Windows install. That makes sense given the GPU boost instability and unstable tensor cores. I just hope I don’t have to do a full Windows update again.
The issue seems linked to GPU boost and tensor core instability. When upscaling is disabled, a black screen persists after several minutes, possibly due to ongoing ray tracing usage of those cores.
Tensor cores are hardware components, but the problems seem linked to GPU Boost overclocking, possibly leading to instability. This points toward a driver-related issue, something I’ve encountered before. When the screen goes black due to ray tracing attempts, it’s likely because tensor cores failed. In games like Cyberpunk, this would show up as a CTD, while in titles such as Minecraft or Fortnite, it wouldn’t be as noticeable. The core problem appears to be a crash or instability when ray tracing is active, and the fix is simply lowering the GPU speed. It’s clear these issues stem from the same root cause.