Thank you sir! I hadn't spotted that, but I will test it. I'm currently also troubleshooting what I think is likely an unrelated issue (https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/87458/), but hopefully the original crashing issue does not resurface. If it does I'll report back. Thanks again!

brians
We were getting more certain it was a driver issue, introduced sometime after 495.89, and were attempting to narrow it down to get some information back to NVidia (proving a little difficult given it exhibited heisenbug behavior). But the most recent driver (526.86) is working fine for us. So hearing it's working fine for you too gives me confidence this bug may have been fixed (or at least crawled back under its rock).
Brian

Thank you!!!
I was going crazy trying to resolve this as well.
@Alpha plus velocities wasn't working with Karma XPU until new nvidia driver. Now it is

I have though run into an issue whereby lots geometry with alpha and large velocities still fails to render opacity with the addition of a volume. Will try to narrow it down.

brians
I'm guessing you might already know, but NVidia released a new Studio driver last week (526.98)

I had same issue with my two old 1080ti cards. Even on a fairly simple scene GPUs would fail at the start and then CPU would take a hit. Can confirm that updating to the latest nvidia studio drivers seem to have fixed the issue. Mainly GPUs are working now.