Update 5: We've been examining post anew pre-driver status to observe what NVIDIA has been doing. Today I have tested many games like DOOM Eternal, Strange Brigade, Control, Battlefield V and high extreme FPS pushing Resident Evil, all without crashes at three resolutions tested. Apparently it's at titles like Horizon Zero Dawn that seems to be effected to most, specifically in a Quad HD resolution.
Reports from the web are that the driver does fix the issue at hand for most if not all people. So what did NVIDIA do?
Earlier today we have tested, analyzed (and confirmed) that NVIDIA has been tweaking the clock and voltage frequencies. Our homegrown AfterBurner can analyze and help here. Below you can compare the 456.38 and new 456.55 driver VF curve, it now is slightly different and clearly shifted to precisely 2000 MHz in the upper range. So NVIDIA has taken the edge off the frequency as well as a slightly lower voltage seems to be applied. The plot below is based on the FE card, not even AIB. So NVIDIA is applying this driver wide and for their own founder cards as well.
During testing, we also re-ran the benchmarks, and it had offset effects that are close to zero, meaning at 100 FPS you'd perhaps see a 1 FPS differential, but that can be easily assigned to random anomalies as well. As to why there is so little performance decrease is simple, not many games trigger the GPU all the way the end of the spectrum at say 2050 MHz. That's isolated to very few titles as most games are GPU bound and hover in the 1900 MHz domain.
We think it's fixed at driver level this way, but this leaves open the topic of AIB card OC products and tweaking stability, of course. Granted I have been stating in our reviews that Ampere seemed very hard to tweak. That picture fits wide into what we have seen and read in the past couple of days. Typically in the past, you had ~10% playroom for tweaking, these days it's just a few percent. I think the margins are so small these days (this goes for processors as well) that if something goes wrong, it falls outside that margin of error and immediately presents itself into behavior we have seen the past couple of days.
Should you still experience CTDs and have a GeForce RTX 3080, we'd love to hear from you in the comment thread below. But at this point, it seems stabilized with the
456.55 driver band-aid.