Late last week, Nvidia confirmed that there was a "rare" manufacturing defect with early shipments of their new GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs. The issue being that some cards shipped with fewer render output units (ROP) than they should have. This results in a fancy new graphics card that isn't able to actually meet the performance metrics that are advertised and sold.
ROPs work in tandem with other components on a graphics card to produce the image you see on your screen. More specifically, a ROP unit is "responsible for the processing of final pixel values prior to drawing them to the screen." They handle things like blending, anti-aliasing, render-to-texture, and writing the final values of pixels to the frame buffer.
The issue surfaced last week when at least one user noticed GPU-Z gave them a different than expected value for the number of ROPs on their Zotac RTX 5090 Solid. That card should have 176 ROPs but some cards are only reporting 168 ROPs. According to reporting from TechPowerUp, those eight missing ROPs results in roughly a 4.5% loss in rasterization performance. In real-world testing with an Elden Ring benchmark, they saw a performance loss of 5.6% compared to a Founder's Edition 5090, and an 8.4% reduction compared to an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC.
Slowly, more reports started to trickle in by new RTX 5090 owners that reported similar findings. Their cards were missing those eight ROPs. The issue wasn't limited to a specific vendor either. These reports were coming in for cards from Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, Palit, Inno3D, and MSI. Mind you, this issue wasn't impacting everyone with a 50-series card, only some.
It eventually reached the point where Nvidia had to issue a statement. Here is what Nvidia's global PR director Ben Berraondo said to The Verge:
We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have one fewer ROP than specified. The average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.
Fast-forward to today, and it's been confirmed by Nvidia that the RTX 5080 is impacted by this defect. Nvidia released a new statement, this time to TechPowerUp, confirming what some users started to discover over the weekend:
Upon further investigation, we've identified that an early production build of GeForce RTX 5080 GPUs were also affected by the same issue. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement.
The fact that this defect impacts the entire existing lineup of the 50-series is quite curious. How did this issue somehow avoid detection by Nvidia or by any of the third-party vendors during testing? Already, people are suggesting that Nvidia knew that some of the cards were defective but decided to sell them anyway in hopes that nobody would notice. With the stock already being as meager as it is, it's not entirely unreasonable to believe this was the case.
(Image via TechPowerUp)
