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Facepalm: Nvidia’s RTX 50 series has experienced one of the most unpopular launches in recent memory, with moderate-at-best performance gains, severe supply constraints, and dramatically inflated prices from board partners. To make matters worse, some customers have begun reporting units with defective components, leading to slightly lower performance.
The few lucky users who acquired Nvidia’s flagship RTX 5090 soon after its initial launch should run GPU-Z to check if all 176 of the graphics card’s ROP units are functioning properly. Some customers recently complained upon receiving GPUs with only 168 enabled, decreasing performance by up to five percent depending on the workload. Whether the problem is related to software or hardware remains unclear.
Raster Operations Pipeline (ROP) units perform one of the final steps in the rasterization process, which calculates onscreen pixels. Nvidia’s white paper on the RTX 50 series’ Blackwell architecture states that the 5090 features 176 ROPs, which TechPowerUp’s GPU-Z software confirms.
MSI 5090D https://t.co/Ij48LQ98hD pic.twitter.com/EfHgPcMi2k
– HXL (@9550pro) February 21, 2025
However, a user on the outlet’s forums noticed that GPU-Z detected only 168 ROPs on their Zotac RTX 5090 Solid model. TechPowerUp confirmed the discrepancy when testing that model, observing minor performance drops depending on the game despite maintaining the same clock speed as GPUs from different board partners.
Elden Ring, when modded to remove its 60fps frame rate cap, saw the largest divergence, dropping by 5.6% to 174fps from the 184fps observed in Nvidia’s Founders Edition reference model. However, other games like Starfield and Doom Eternal, with ray tracing enabled in the latter, experienced virtually no degradation.
Furthermore, the problem isn’t limited to Zotac graphics cards, nor does it extend to all Zotac units. Following the initial report, other users on Twitter and the Chiphell forums shared similar GPU-Z reports from MSI, Gigabyte, and Founders Edition models. Some also seem to have Zotac versions with all 176 ROPs enabled.
The root cause is the chip. A small batch of GB202 is defective, and the bios can not do anything with this issue.
– MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) February 21, 2025
It’s speculated that the problem stems from a hardware issue rather than software as reinstalling drivers, reinstalling Windows, and changing the GPU BIOS do not fix the problem. Trusted leaker MEGAsizeGPU claims that a defective batch of GB202 processors is to blame, suggesting that impacted units might need to be replaced.
In a statement sent to The Verge, Nvidia confirmed that it discovered an issue affecting less than half a percent of RTX 5090, 5090D, and 5070 Ti GPUs, which shipped with at least one ROP missing. This can affect gaming performance by around four percent, but AI and compute performance are unaffected. The company has corrected the manufacturing glitch and advises impacted customers to contact board vendors.
The RTX 5090 and 5090D are the only GPUs confirmed to be missing ROPs thus far. Some users became concerned after their 5080s reported “112 out of 128” units, but 112 is the correct number of ROPs for that card.
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