DnBrn
So we've seen many threads on the issues involved with the 980 FTW card and in some cases the Superclocked versions or even the 970 as well.  All having the similar issue of TDR crashes, aka black/white screen, etc.  Today someone posted yet another thread to the Elite: Dangerous forum regarding crashes he was having with his 980 SC.  What we have ended up finding is that, along with the usual under clocking that most of us have had to do, if you enable 4k DSR in the game this also alleviates the crashing.

The theory with this game in particular is the following written by their support:

We are aware of such problems but have not been able to pinpoint the cause exactly. It seems to occur mostly with cards that are factory over clocked.

Please note, the following is by no means a statement of absolute fact, it is our current understanding of the situation.

The issue seems to be that these cards are optimised for constant high load. Elite however tends to cause phases of maximum load interspersed with lower usage. Especially events like exiting from hyperspace near a star for example cause the load to rise from very low to very high. This seems to cause the cards in question to fail to adjust power levels quickly enough, their processor in turn briefly suffers from low voltage and behaves undefined, causing a crash.

Down-clocking the card in question lowers its power draw and alleviates the problem. It would be conceivable that small variations in production quality make a percentage of the affected card models more resistant to the issue, that would explain why having a replacement solved the problem for some people while it did not for others.

I am afraid as of now lowering the clock rate is the only solution at this point, we will continue to look into fixing the problem of course. I am sorry that I cannot be of greater assistance in this matter.

Fly Safe and Kind Regards,
CMDR Vega, Support Wing

Another thread on the forum was started and new information has been found:

I suspect that it it GPU boost that caused frequency and voltage fluctuations. It seems to me that turning on DSR (3840x2160) has solved the issue for me by increasing the GPU load, which lead to stable GPU frequency and voltage. No crashes today for 2 hours at much higher +70MHz comparing to yesterday without DSR.

Another option is to down-clock the GPU.

I can confirm that so far, this has made the card stable while playing this game and has definitely increased the usage of the card.  What I have noticed by downclocking the card before is that, for whatever reason, boost was disabled and it actually only down clocked the card by -1 even though I told it -51.  This of course is odd, but this is what Precision X is saying.  I do not know if it is a display bug or what it is.  By enabling DSR, while in the game, the performance has been basically locked to it's full stock potential at 1455 mhz due to it now requiring a full time high performance due to the increased load.

So what we see here is an example of forcing stability by "locking" it to a performance level, either below stock or at max potential.  I say locking because in either case, there is no fluctuations involved, it is either at 1277 or 1455 full time, which also means no voltage fluctuations as well. This may be why the card has never failed me in benchmarks.

Obviously, this would require much further testing that I'm sure no one wants to do as everyone is probably fed up and just in the 980Ti queue at this point.  This also is not to say that it's suddenly a good batch of cards either.  Even with this find, I remain in the 980Ti queue.  I found it interesting though and wanted to share with everyone.

Samsander
I also tested this theory on 3DMark Skydiver. That always crashes in minutes.

Run custom Demo mode at 1080P, triliniar filtering, tessellation set to 5. It crashes in minutes with black screen. BSOD 116 is logged after restart.

Now Run custom Demo mode at 4K DSR resolution, anisotropic filtering set to x16, tessellation leave at 5 and it will loop for hours without crashing.

So power fluctuations is a real problem with GTX980 FTW.
Maybe this can be fixed with a BIOS update, maybe not. I guess we can only wait and see what EVGA does about this.

DnBrn

Methodical2
Question.  Can the same be said if you use Precision X boost mode?  Curious.

I haven't tried it, but theoretically, it should since K-boost locks the card to max performance.

Red46
Those workarounds are only helpful to provide the evga techs with as much info as possible. You shouldn't be required to use third party programs or, play around with extremely taxating graphic options that in graphically demanding games are not really feasible to use to begin with, just to get the card to run as it should be doing out of the box (EG not crashing and bringing the whole system down with it)

stalinx20

rsabatino
I have had problems only with the latest drivers I go back to 350.12 no tdrs

Are you overclocking?
If so, not every driver is going to be stable with your overclocks. You might need to lower a little more to get the latest drivers stable. The latest drivers are not a problem with everyone, just a few amount of people.