NVidia RTX3080 Crashing to a Black Screen on an RTX 3080: Things to Try

Quick take: a sudden black screen while gaming often still with some sound artefacts using my RTX 3080. Usually this comes down to power, heat, drivers. I had this problem for a whole month before I found what the fix was. I was truly at my whit's end before the solution presented itself. I replaced the card for a 4070 Super, as I did I had to disassemble a lot of the gaming rig revealing the cables and at the same time their routing and connections. This list is ordered from the quickest checks to the more involved ones, it is not guaranteed to work, but at least you may find an answer or clue to what is going on. If you find all the steps don't help, take the opportunity to clean and rebuild the game rig, it wont hurt to use some contact cleaner on the power connections, just wipe off the access as the cleaner will attract dust. I went to the extreme and re-pasted the 3080 heatsink, it took a while to ensure the GC temps were balanced by re-installing the heat pads in different thicknesses until I was happy with the temps, but its worth the effort as the 3080 runs very hot and the heatsink is trying to lose 300 watts at times.

Quick software checks

  1. Update your GPU drivers. Install the latest driver from Nvidia. If the crashes started after an update, try the previous version.
  2. Update Windows and your motherboard BIOS. Old firmware can cause stability problems.
  3. Verify the game files. In Steam, right-click ARK, then Properties, Installed Files, Verify integrity.
  4. Turn off overlays and monitoring tools. Disable GPU, chat and recording overlays, and any overclocking software, while testing.
  5. Lower the game settings. Drop shadows and textures first, and cap the frame rate.

Power and heat

  1. Monitor temperatures. Use a tool such as HWMonitor and watch the GPU and CPU while you play.
  2. Use proper power cables. Give the card its own PCIe power cables, and do not use adapters or daisy-chain one cable to several connectors.
  3. Check your power supply. The RTX 3080 has large short power spikes. Use a good-quality supply with plenty of headroom.

Hardware and setup

  1. Test your hardware. Run memory and graphics diagnostics to look for errors.
  2. Try a single monitor. Multi-monitor setups can trigger the fault.
  3. Unplug USB graphics adapters. They can conflict with the GPU.
  4. Reinstall the game. As a last resort, do a clean reinstall. ARK is a very large install, so leave plenty of time.

What fixed it for me

My crashes came down to two things together. First, a poor modular cable. Second, it was not connected to the PSU properly: both of the card's power connectors were fed from one rail, when one should go to a socket on the top of the PSU and the other to a socket on the bottom. An RTX 3080 pulls big power spikes, and a weak cable on a single rail can't cope, so the card cut out and the screen went black.

I bought a much better cable, split the two connectors across the top and bottom sockets, and the crashes stopped. It had cost me a month of troubleshooting. Not long after, I upgraded to an RTX 4070 Super. The issue was the sudden surge in current on the one PSU rail causing the cable or PSU to dip bellow a usable voltage threshold thus crashing the card

If it still crashes

Try other demanding games or a stress test. If they crash too, the fault is likely hardware, such as the power supply, the cables or the card, rather than your game.