I think it was well into 2013 because both the 2011 and 2013 MBPs I had suffered from it. but I thought that was an apple issue (ie not soldering the dicrete gpu well enough to save money on it)
after the 2 faulty products in a row, I haven't bought an apple product since.
No, it was Nvidia because of the way the BGA solder was done. The problem was across manufacturers.
The infamous early 2011 MBPs had AMD GPUs that basically crapped out the entire logic board. That was what got me to switch back to Windows.