NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 Crashes During Million Dollar CS2 Tournament Despite Being Selected As The GPU Of Choice

A few weeks back, PGL announced its hardware of choice for its upcoming CS2 Major Tournament which included systems with AMD Ryzen 7 7800X3D CPUs and NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 GPUs but it looks like things didn't go as planned as a driver crash associated with the GPU became the very reason of one team's chances of going into the playoffs being washed away.

PCGamesN explains that the issue occurred during a match between Virtus Pro and G2. Virtus Pro's player, James, was up against his opponents in the second run of a best of three when his PC ran into a major malfunction. G2 was able to win that round and proceeded to outbeat Virtus Pro by 11-13 which squashed their opportunity to enter the playoffs. James put out a very positive video in which he stated that these hiccups are part of the game and that he remains hopeful for the next tournaments.

With that said, PGL did go public about this issue and stated that the technical malfunction occurred due to an NVIDIA driver crash which subsequently resulted in the game crashing on James. The PC was running an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4080 GPU (Non-SUPER) which technically is very-well optimized in CS2. The game event supports NVIDIA's Reflex technology, giving gamers edge in terms of latency feedback and response times which are essential for eSports gaming.

PGL has since stated that they are working with NVIDIA to identify and fix the issue. What's even more important is that this driver crash occurred despite PGL having stated that they had "meticulously optimized" the gaming setups for the tournament.

We are working now with NVIDIA to identify and fix the issue.

— PGL (@pglesports) March 24, 2024

Now this isn't the first time that a game has crashed at a major tournament and it by no means suggests that NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 4080 GPU isn't worth buying. Games and drivers can often crash out of nowhere and sometimes its so random that there's no explanation behind what has happened. Given that James is just one person who experienced this issue during the tournament means that maybe this PC wasn't tested correctly or the driver installation may have gone wrong. We will wait for PGL and NVIDIA's official statement regarding this matter.