I was lucky enough to nab a 3070 at my local Microcenter just over a month ago – an MSI Ventus 3x. I was floored by the performance, 60+ FPS at 1440p. Delicious. I was super excited to try out some ray-traced games. That's when the problems began.
I had played through Control on my previous RX470. It ran well with tuned-down settings at 1080p. I maxed-out everything on my new 3070. Within 5 minutes of gameplay, Control would freeze, forcing a Task-Manager hard close of the game. These sub 5 minute crashes happened every time - but only with RT enabled. "Weird," I thought, maybe just a buggy RT game. I set Control aside and didn't think too much into it.
Then Metro Exodus Enhanced came along and I definitely wanted to play through that with all the RT bells and whistles. After installation and booting it up, I got to the main menu. I eagerly maxed out all the settings and enabled DLSS, then started a new game. The new-game intro played. It ended and the game attempted to load. The game instantly crashed back to desktop and the game's error reporter popped up. Tried again. Same result. Over and over. I tried messing around with all the settings, DLSS on/off, lower resolution, etc. I contacted Metro's developer's customer support (very responsive, btw), followed all their suggestions, and troubleshot the game via Google searches. Nothing worked to solve the crashes.
Amongst the fixes I attempted: Adjusting the size of the Page File, turning off all overclocks, turning on/off G-Sync, disabling any overlays, turning off any other running applications, updating the VBIOS, setting PCIE to 3.0, performing a clean system start with no other non-Windows services running, trying other cables (HDMI and DisplayPort)/ports, and more. Finally, I did a full clean reinstall of Windows. Despite all these attempted fixes, the problems with Control and Metro Enhanced persisted, and even got worse: Control would crash within a couple minutes, Metro crashed after the launch cinematic, right before the main menu would load.
All these issues only happened when RT features were enabled. Any non-RT games or games that had RT features but they were turned off ran flawlessly. I began to suspect that there was some kind of hardware issue with the RT features of the card. To attempt to confirm this I got a few more RT enabled games: Quake II RTX, Battlefield V, and Bright Memory: Infinite's RT benchmark. Sure enough, all had issues: Quake and Bright Memory would each crash in under two minutes. Battlefield V would crash instantly if RT was enabled. If it was disabled, the game ran perfectly.
To further corroborate my defective hardware theory, I removed the card and installed it into a completely different system. The issues with RT games were identical. That system also had an RTX card, a 3060. I reinstalled it and it had no problems whatsoever with RT.
Have I missed any potential fixes? Is my next move to RMA the card? It would obviously suck to be without a GPU for a month or more, but I paid a premium for an RTX card and I want it to work.
The specs for the systems I've used with the card:
System 1: Ryzen 5 2600 (stock), 1TB NVME SSD, 16 GB DDR4 Ram @ 2933 Mhz, MSI X470 Gaming Plus MB, EVGA 650 Watt PSU
System 2: i5 10600K (stock), 1TB NVME SSD, 16 GB DDR4 Ram @ 3600 Mhz, Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Elite MB, EVGA 650 Watt PSU
I had played through Control on my previous RX470. It ran well with tuned-down settings at 1080p. I maxed-out everything on my new 3070. Within 5 minutes of gameplay, Control would freeze, forcing a Task-Manager hard close of the game. These sub 5 minute crashes happened every time - but only with RT enabled. "Weird," I thought, maybe just a buggy RT game. I set Control aside and didn't think too much into it.
Then Metro Exodus Enhanced came along and I definitely wanted to play through that with all the RT bells and whistles. After installation and booting it up, I got to the main menu. I eagerly maxed out all the settings and enabled DLSS, then started a new game. The new-game intro played. It ended and the game attempted to load. The game instantly crashed back to desktop and the game's error reporter popped up. Tried again. Same result. Over and over. I tried messing around with all the settings, DLSS on/off, lower resolution, etc. I contacted Metro's developer's customer support (very responsive, btw), followed all their suggestions, and troubleshot the game via Google searches. Nothing worked to solve the crashes.
Amongst the fixes I attempted: Adjusting the size of the Page File, turning off all overclocks, turning on/off G-Sync, disabling any overlays, turning off any other running applications, updating the VBIOS, setting PCIE to 3.0, performing a clean system start with no other non-Windows services running, trying other cables (HDMI and DisplayPort)/ports, and more. Finally, I did a full clean reinstall of Windows. Despite all these attempted fixes, the problems with Control and Metro Enhanced persisted, and even got worse: Control would crash within a couple minutes, Metro crashed after the launch cinematic, right before the main menu would load.
All these issues only happened when RT features were enabled. Any non-RT games or games that had RT features but they were turned off ran flawlessly. I began to suspect that there was some kind of hardware issue with the RT features of the card. To attempt to confirm this I got a few more RT enabled games: Quake II RTX, Battlefield V, and Bright Memory: Infinite's RT benchmark. Sure enough, all had issues: Quake and Bright Memory would each crash in under two minutes. Battlefield V would crash instantly if RT was enabled. If it was disabled, the game ran perfectly.
To further corroborate my defective hardware theory, I removed the card and installed it into a completely different system. The issues with RT games were identical. That system also had an RTX card, a 3060. I reinstalled it and it had no problems whatsoever with RT.
Have I missed any potential fixes? Is my next move to RMA the card? It would obviously suck to be without a GPU for a month or more, but I paid a premium for an RTX card and I want it to work.
The specs for the systems I've used with the card:
System 1: Ryzen 5 2600 (stock), 1TB NVME SSD, 16 GB DDR4 Ram @ 2933 Mhz, MSI X470 Gaming Plus MB, EVGA 650 Watt PSU
System 2: i5 10600K (stock), 1TB NVME SSD, 16 GB DDR4 Ram @ 3600 Mhz, Gigabyte Z590 AORUS Elite MB, EVGA 650 Watt PSU
Last edited: