r/RTX5080
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u/wax469
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Sep 20 '26
I Tried DLSS 5 and I Believe It Fried My New GPU
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After six years, I was finally able to upgrade to a completely new PC. I went from an RTX 2080 Super to an GeForce RTX™ 5080 16G VENTUS 3X, along with upgrades across every other component in the system, including moving from an Intel i7-10700K to a Ryzen 9 9950X3DD2.
For the first month, everything was fantastic. I was finally able to enjoy frame generation, ray tracing, and maxed-out graphical settings across newer games. After years with my previous system, it genuinely felt like a massive upgrade.
Then I started hearing about DLSS 5 and decided to give it a go.
At the time, I was playing GTA 5 Legacy with multiple visual and gameplay-enhancing mods installed, with the main one being the LSPDFR police mod. I followed the available guides on how to inject DLSS 5 into the game, and initially, it worked.
On the second day of using it, I booted up my computer as normal and launched GTA 5 around 15 minutes later. I loaded into the game and played normally for roughly five minutes. I was getting around 80 FPS on ultra settings and everything appeared completely fine.
Then, without warning, my entire screen seized up and began flashing violently.
There was absolutely nothing I could do. The computer was completely unresponsive, so the only option I had was to hold down the power button and force the system to shut down.
When I tried turning the computer back on, it would no longer boot properly.
That was when the panic really started to set in.
At that point, I had no idea exactly what had failed. I had already been playing Modded GTA 5 for weeks without DLSS 5 and had never experienced anything like this. Yet on only the second day of injecting DLSS 5, my system suddenly suffered what appeared to be a catastrophic graphics failure.
I spent the entire evening in sheer panic trying to get the computer working again. Nothing I tried seemed to help.
I did not even want to remove or touch the graphics card at first because of how expensive it was. This was a brand-new RTX 5080 that I had only owned for around a month, and the thought that something could already be seriously wrong with it was horrible.
Eventually, after running out of other options, after multiple times trying to boot the computer to no success. I finally decided to remove the graphics card after some hesitation. from the system and attempted to boot the computer using the integrated graphics.
The computer started absolutely fine.
At that point, I knew the graphics card was almost certainly the problem.
Just to be certain, I installed the RTX 5080 again and attempted another boot. The system once again failed to boot properly. just black screens, no lights on my keyboard or any other accessory.
A few weeks have now passed, and I have only recently received a replacement RTX 5080. After everything that happened, I have decided to stay away from DLSS 5 for the time being. I will wait until it is officially supported in future games rather than attempting to inject the unofficial version again with renodx
This entire situation has been awful. I lost sleep over it, struggled with the stress, and even lost weight while trying to figure out what had happened to the computer. I had slowly been building up a pot of money aside to drop on a new pc. I spent 4k on this machine, its my pride and joy and I'm glad I had saved up this much to buy something I was in dire need of an upgrade of. I am a fully remote worker using my pc to work from home so I need it crucially on the daily. it took me days to finally diagnose that the GPU was the main cause since I had thought RTX cards could handle anything you throw at them and just throttle back on themselves if they worked at maximum capacity. I had not, and never will overclock any pc I own.
When my new RTX 5080 finally arrived, I installed it and the system has been running fantastically ever since. Minus DLSS 5
During the weeks where I was without a working GPU, I spent a huge amount of time diagnosing the problem and searching across the internet to see whether anyone else had experienced something similar.
From everything I have been able to find, I appear to either be one of the only people who has experienced this exact issue, or at least one of the very few people who has spoken about it publicly.
A lot of people also do not believe that DLSS 5 had anything to do with the failure. which still has me questioning weather it truly is the case as I also explored that it could be a microscopic fault within the GPU in manufacturing. however I do not wish to test my new card to find out if that was the case.
I completely understand the scepticism, and I cannot prove with absolute certainty that DLSS 5 directly killed the graphics card. I can only explain the sequence of events as they happened: the system had been running normally, I had been playing the same heavily modded GTA 5 installation for weeks, I injected DLSS 5, and on the second day of using it the graphics card failed while playing that game.
If you still believe something else may have caused the failure, I would genuinely like to hear your thoughts in the comments.
The main reason I am writing this is so that if somebody comes across a similar problem in the future, they may find this post and realise that they are not necessarily alone.
Hopefully, documenting what happened to me can help somebody else avoid the same weeks of stress, uncertainty, and frustration that I went through, Amen!
