NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 still only officially supports NBA 2K27 to date. Many players can’t wait, so they use third-party mods made by the community, allowing more games to get DLSS 5 effects, such as Hogwarts Legacy, Control, Hitman 3, GTA V, and more. However, using this kind of third-party DLSS 5 mod is not without risk.
A gamer overseas recently shared on Reddit that an MSI RTX 5080 he had only bought a month earlier and never overclocked started flickering wildly after 5 minutes of playing GTA V with a third-party DLSS 5 mod enabled, and then the entire card died outright—it wouldn’t even boot.
Image source: VideoCardz
An overseas player used a third-party DLSS 5 mod in GTA V, and after 5 minutes the screen started flickering and the entire card wouldn’t boot.
According to foreign media VideoCardz According to a report, a Reddit user wax469 shared on r/RTX5080 that his graphics card is an MSI GeForce RTX 5080 16G VENTUS 3X and his processor is a Ryzen 9 9950X3D; the graphics card was only about a month old, had not been overclocked, and had always worked normally. He had installed the LSPDFR police mod and a bunch of graphics enhancement mods in GTA V Legacy and had played for several weeks without issues, until he added DLSS 5 and things went wrong.
The game had been running for about 5 minutes at around 80 FPS on Ultra settings, then the screen suddenly froze and began flashing violently, with graphical artifacts appearing on both monitors. He described it himself as “without warning, my entire screen seized up and began flashing violently.” The entire computer was unresponsive, and the only option was to hold down the power button to force a hard shutdown.
I Tried DLSS 5 and I Believe It Fried My New GPU
byu/wax469 inRTX5080
After shutting down, the problem didn’t improve—it actually got worse. When the RTX 5080 is installed in the computer, it can no longer boot normally. He tested removing the graphics card and switching to the 9950X3D’s integrated graphics, and the computer booted normally. When he put the 5080 back in, the problem returned. So the conclusion is obvious: the graphics card is dead.
NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 does not yet support GTA V, so he did it through a third-party DLSS 5 mod. Following a tutorial provided in the RenoDX community Discord, he injected DLSS 5 Neural Rendering into GTA V Legacy through a third-party method. Currently, RenoDX is also one of the common community solutions for running DLSS 5 in games without official support.
Fortunately, after confirming the card was dead, he applied for a warranty replacement, and even though he was using a third-party module, the replacement was still approved. A few weeks later, he received a new card of the same model, and the computer could boot and run normally. He also mentioned that the new card runs “flawlessly,” and this time he learned his lesson: he’ll wait until more games officially support DLSS 5 before using it.
Also, a reminder: wax469 successfully getting a replacement card is a special case, since using third-party mods to enable DLSS 5 would theoretically void the warranty.
The VideoCardz report also mentioned that the video shared by wax469 showed random visual artifacts, which matches the symptoms they’ve often seen when VRAM is unstable or faulty—usually caused by memory being overclocked too far or defective memory chips. Although wax469 stressed that he had not overclocked at all, the RTX 5080 has 8 GDDR7 memory chips, and if even one of them has a problem, this can happen. Most people in the Reddit thread also felt that the card was defective to begin with, and the extra load from DLSS 5 merely forced it out.
Source: KOCPC Chinese