Fixing Gainward RTX 5080 driver crashes in AC Shadows
Right in the middle of a stealth kill, the game would just freeze and crash to desktop after about two hours. This kind of performance cliff is just pathetic for a card this expensive. The Gainward RTX 5080 was hitting a bug in the shader cache management under certain drivers, causing VRAM usage to climb until it simply overflowed. I tried dropping every single setting to Low, but the crash still happened like clockwork at the two-hour mark. It was honestly depressing. I ended up using DDU to wipe everything and installed the Studio drivers instead, then manually locked the shader cache to 10GB in the control panel. Resource Monitor showed the VRAM peak stabilizing at 12GB - 14GB, and the crashes stopped completely. I did lose my RGB lighting control after the driver swap, but a quick reinstall of the software fixed it. Temps are now a steady 65°C - 72°C. I've backed up the driver version and cache settings via a system snapshot, and the input response is finally snappy again.
