After repeated denials from Nvidia that any kind of major issue had been discovered in its RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition cards, despite large numbers of reports to the contrary on its official forums and the Nvidia subreddit, Nvidia has finally posted an explanation. It's a weak one, but it does at least admit that there was a significant, if narrow issue with the $1,200 cards.
Following a contentious debut and slow launch following the announcement of its excessive pricing, the 2080 Ti began showing up in all of the most powerful gaming PCs in the world... only to begin failing, crashing, and breaking entirely in the days that followed. Hundreds of buyers complained on the Nvidia forums and after investigations by a number of news outlets and reviewers, it seemed that the Founders Edition cards were the main culprit.
Nvidia's claim at the time was that it wasn't seeing any issues outside of individual cards, but that it was monitoring the situation. Third party manufacturers and card partners claimed to not be seeing any issues at all, and even had lower-numbers of failures than they typically saw.
So it was the Founders Edition cards causing issues and Nvidia has now admitted it. Its latest statement reads:
"Limited test escapes from early boards caused the issues some customers have experienced with RTX 2080 Ti Founders Edition."
It hasn't detailed what the quality control issue was, or why those cards have been failing the way they have been. Most receiving RMA cards are now out of the woods, so whatever the problem is, Nvidia seems to have fixed it, but it's unfortunate that such a problem happened to such an expensive card.