It has hardly been a month since the release of NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti GPUs but problems have already started cropping up. According to online reports, courtesy of the disgruntled owners of the INR 72,000+ graphics cards, the new GPUs are failing. However, with no official stats from NVIDIA, it is hard to comment on the severity of the problem.
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RMAs Are Not Going Well
Per posts on the NVIDIA GeForce forums, Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter, the owners of new cards have been faced with a host of problems, including crashes, BSODs, black screens, and artifacts. Some users have even reported that the cards are dying on them already. While most people have reported problems with the RTX 2080 Ti, some have experienced issues with the standard RTX 2080 too.
NVIDIA is aware of the problem and is currently dealing with users individually, but the company doesn’t see it as a widespread issue. Although NVIDIA is handling RMAs by replacing GPUs, that has apparently failed to resolve the problem as some of the new RTX 2080 Ti have turned out to be faulty too. This has led some users to believe that the new GPUs have an inherent architectural defect.
Exact Failure Rate Is Not Known
It seems that most of the broken GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards are from the company’s own Founders Edition family, but reportedly some custom cards have exhibited problems too. Although NVIDIA has sort of swept the problem under the rug, based on the number of complaints lodged online, it seems that out of the cards based on the new Turing GPU architecture, the ones belonging to the 2080 Ti Founders Editions are most likely to crash and fail. However, it is possible that only a small fraction of cards have been affected and they somehow managed to slip right from under the nose of QA and make it to the market.
NVIDIA had touted its new RTX 2080 and RTX 2080 Ti as one of the fastest graphics processors around, offering ray tracing and 4K resolution at 60fps. The company has launched a new graphics driver to address the BSOD problems, but it will not remedy the hardware-level problems.
Here is a little more about the new Turing architecture, in case you are interested:
