NVIDIA RTX 5080 Reportedly Dies After DLSS 5 Test in Modded GTA 5

An MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G Ventus 3X reportedly stopped working after its owner injected an unofficial version of DLSS 5 into a heavily modded copy of Grand Theft Auto 5. Reddit user “wax469” said the card had been running fine for about a month before the crash. According to the post, the screen began flashing uncontrollably about five minutes into a session, and the system refused to boot afterward. Swapping to his Ryzen 9 9950X3D2’s integrated graphics let the PC start normally, and reinstalling the RTX 5080 brought the failure back. A replacement card of the same model has apparently worked without issues since.

It’s worth being cautious here. NVIDIA has not released DLSS 5 for GTA 5, so the injection relied on unofficial tools, and the user says the card was running at stock settings with no overclock. There’s no photo evidence of physical damage, and it’s entirely possible a manufacturing defect was already present and just got exposed under load. Whether DLSS 5 had anything to do with it remains unconfirmed. The user was running a heavily modified version of GTA 5 Legacy, and adding unofficial DLSS 5 seems to be what eventually led to the failure.

Still, this isn’t the first time DLSS 5 has been tied to a hardware scare. Tom’s Hardware has reported that DLSS 5 is linked to a significant increase in power draw. We also reported recently on an RTX 5090 whose 16-pin connector melted during official DLSS 5 testing in NBA 2K27, with power draw spiking past 600 W. That…