Stay on 472.xx drivers for now (Possible GPU damage)

Xaymar
—
01/26/2022
Hey @everyone! After a bit of investigation into NVIDIA's drivers, mainly for VoiceFX but also affecting StreamFX, I've come across some rather bad news. These bad news don't affect Pascal (10xx) or earlier users, only Turing (20xx) and Ampere (30xx). Primarily it affects the NVIDIA Broadcast features that are now available in OBS Studio with StreamFX v0.11.0.

In order to keep this short, I'll get to the point. If you updated your NVIDIA Driver beyond 472.xx, you will encounter odd stability issues in OBS Studio when multiple Tensor effects are loaded. This even affects the integrated Noise Removal filter. This can take the form of OBS freezing, nothing working correctly, or even temporary or permanent damage to the GPU. Unfortunately it appears that not many people have reported this issue to NVIDIA, so nothing has been done about this regression so far.

If you do intend to downgrade, please note that you will lose:
- Support for more recent GPUs.
- Support for more recent Games.
- A significant chunk of NVENC performance (around 80%!)
- And possibly warranty on your GPU, depending on your region.

One alternative appears to disable Hardware Scheduling in Windows, if you have the option to.

Xaymar
—
Yesterday at 10:37 PM
@everyone To extend on the above, the confirmed dead GPUs I have received reports about are from the following AIB partners: Gigabyte, ASUS and EVGA. A per-card run down of the problems reported:

Gigabyte:
1. RTX 3060: Died during usage of Noise Removal. No longer shows any signs of life when the PC is turned on.
2. RTX 3070: Died upon loading Noise Removal. Same as above.

ASUS:
1. RTX 3060: Freeze during loading of Noise Removal. Upon reboot everything seemed fine until the GPU started showing corrupted squares on the Desktop itself. Shortly afterwards, froze again, then no longer responsive after reboot.

EVGA:
1. RTX 3060: Suddenly shut down during gaming while Noise Removal was running. No signs of life after reboot.
2. RTX 3080: Similar to above, but still worked after rebooting. Loading any Tensor effects however immediately causes the GPU to corrupt and freeze.

As far as reports go, so far it seems that cards directly sourced from NVIDIA are unaffected by this, only AIBs have it. Some AIBs seem to also be unaffected, though I will not make a judgement on why - that is something for more skilled electricly aligned people.

Wow, very interesting.

Any test on a Zotac 3060ti?