h264/HEVC hardware accelerated encoding/decoding causes GPU to crash

Posting this to see if anyone else has had this issue, and to solve the mystery if you've been trying to fix it.

I got my hands on Zotac RTX 3080 last July, and while I reaped obvious benefits, it came with one huge, irritating drawback - Premiere and Media Encoder started crashing my GPU. There was a 50% chance my GPU would crash whenever I clicked/tabbed away from Premiere or AME during specific situations:
- loaded new footage
- waited for footage/thumbnails to process when opening an existing project
- sent a video to export
- started rendering an export

My PC would lock up for ~30 seconds, then the screen would go black, GPU would reboot and anything that was open and relied on GPU (Adobe apps, vimeo/youtube tabs, etc.) would need to be closed and restarted. I tried everything I could think of to troubleshoot it, changing various cache settings, reinstalling the apps and drivers, switching between studio and game drivers, tweaking GPU settings, etc. I was determined not to give up on my $1300 monstrosity and go back to my 1080, which never had any of these issues, and was now installed in my media server machine anyway.

But after months of this, I was ready to give up and RMA the damn thing. That's when I had one last realization, that the crash never occured when loading footage that wasn't h264/HEVC. So I disabled hardware accelerated h264/HEVC decoding/encoding and like magic, all my problems were solved. Hasn't been a single crash since, though it comes at the cost of slower exports and no longer being able to smoothly playback certain flavours of mp4, which unfortunately makes up about 80% of the footage clients send me.

If anyone else has dealt with this and found a way to leave hardware acceleration on please let me know. The only step I didn't try was a full system reformat. That's on the horizon in the next couple weeks when I upgrade to a 5900X so at that point I'll turn it back on and see how it goes.

System specs:
- Zotac Gaming RTX 3080 Trinity OC (stock speed)
- Ryzen 3900X (stock speed)
- G.SKILL Trident Z Neo Series 64GB RAM
- Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite WiFi MB