Player's RTX 5080 Dies After Unofficial DLSS 5 Mod

A Reddit user says his month-old RTX 5080 died after injecting an unofficial DLSS 5 into GTA 5. Commenters think the card was probably faulty all along.

Imagine saving for six years, dropping $4,000 on a shiny new RTX 5080, and watching it die in a single day. That's the nightmare one Reddit user just lived through.

Reddit user wax469 shared the story: after upgrading from an RTX 2080 Super to an RTX 5080, everything ran perfectly for a month. Then he followed an online guide to inject an unofficial DLSS 5 into GTA 5. The next day, about five minutes into a session, the screen froze and started flickering violently. A forced shutdown later, the PC simply wouldn't boot properly anymore.

Removing the GPU and running on integrated graphics got the system working again. Plug the 5080 back in, and it's black screen city. It took him a few days to pin down the graphics card as the culprit. He ended up swapping in a new card and has decided to stay far, far away from DLSS 5 for now.

The personal toll sounds rough. He says the whole ordeal cost him sleep and so much stress that he lost weight, since the machine is also his only tool for remote work. That's the part that really stings, honestly.

But the comment section isn't buying the DLSS 5 theory outright. The dominant take is that this was probably a coincidence: the card likely had a defect from the start, and DLSS 5 just sped up its reveal. Some point out that DLSS 5 can push GPU power draw to the absolute limit, higher than any game or benchmark, which could trigger a failure in already fragile hardware.

Others trot out the classic reminder that correlation doesn't equal causation. Any heavy load, in any direction, could have caused this. A few voices also suggested checking whether the power supply and cables were up to spec before blaming DLSS 5 at all.

So what do you think actually killed the card? A dodgy GPU, a brutal unofficial mod, or something else entirely? Drop your theories in the comments.