Nvidia's flagship RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards are failing more than they should

UPDATE: Nvidia has responded to the numerous concerns over its flagships cards, telling Tom's Hardware that "it's not an increasing number of users [...], it's not broad [and] we are are working with each user individually like we do always".

The most powerful consumer GPUs to hit the market are experiencing some teething problems at the moment, with a number of early users reporting their Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti graphics cards are failing in a variety of ways.

Among the issues being reported are day-one failures, according to Digital Trends, with instabilities and artifacts being found immediately after installing the card, while others are seeing their GPUs die after a few days of nominal use.

Across both the Nvidia forums and relevant Reddit threads, an alarmingly high number of users have told the tale of their cards dying – more often than not, it's the Founders Edition of the GPU and, in some cases, even their replacement cards from the manufacturer have gone the same way.

• Nvidia GeForce RTX 2080 Ti vs Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti

The GeForce RTX 2080 Ti is the cream of the crop at the moment (when it's actually working), with the capability of handling 60fps, 4K gaming comfortably, as well as sporting the breakthrough feature known as ray tracing.

Perhaps the premature failures wouldn’t be so hard-hitting if the cost of the unit wasn’t so obscene – the Founders Edition will set you back $1,199 (£1,099, AU$1,899) for instance.

Hopefully this is an instance of the first batch of units needing a few kinks ironed out and some bugs patched, as the card shows a lot of promise. 

For all the latest on Nvidia’s greatest, keep following TechRadar's coverage.

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