Tuesday, February 25th 2025
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Cards Spotted with Missing ROPs, NVIDIA Confirms the Issue, Multiple Vendors Affected
TechPowerUp has discovered that there are NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards in retail circulation that come with too few render units, which lowers performance. Zotac's GeForce RTX 5090 Solid comes with fewer ROPs than it should—168 are enabled, instead of the 176 that are part of the RTX 5090 specifications. This loss of 8 ROPs has a small, but noticeable impact on performance. During recent testing, we noticed our Zotac RTX 5090 Solid sample underperformed slightly, falling behind even the NVIDIA RTX 5090 Founders Edition card. At the time we didn't pay attention to the ROP count that TechPowerUp GPU-Z was reporting, and instead spent time looking for other reasons, like clocks, power, cooling, etc.
Two days ago, one of our readers who goes by "Wuxi Gamer," posted this thread on the TechPowerUp Forums, reporting that his retail Zotac RTX 5090 Solid was showing fewer ROPs in GPU-Z than the RTX 5090 should have. The user tried everything from driver to software re-installs, to switching between the two video BIOSes the card comes with, all to no avail. What a coincidence that we had this card in our labs already, so we then dug out our sample. Lo and behold—our sample is missing ROPs, too! GPU-Z is able to read and report these units counts, in this case through NVIDIA's NVAPI driver interface. The 8 missing ROPs constitute a 4.54% loss in the GPU's raster hardware capability, and to illustrate what this means for performance, we've run a couple of tests.
In the first test, "Elden Ring" at 4K UHD with maxed out settings and native resolution (no DLSS), you can see how the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid falls behind every other RTX 5090 we tested, including the NVIDIA Founders Edition, a de facto reference-design that establishes a performance baseline for the RTX 5090. The Zotac card is 5.6% slower than the FE, and 8.4% slower than the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC, the fastest custom design card for this test. Officially, the Solid is clocked at 2407 MHz rated boost frequency, which matches the Founders Edition clocks—it shouldn't be significantly slower in real-life. The interesting thing is that the loss of performance is not visible when monitoring the clock frequencies, because they are as high as expected—there's just fewer units available to take care of the rendering workload.
A ROP (Raster Operations Pipeline) unit in the GPU processes pixel data, handling tasks like blending, antialiasing, render-to-texture, and writing final pixel values to the frame buffer. In contrast, a shading unit, aka "GPU core" is responsible for computing the color, lighting, and material properties of pixels or vertices during the rendering process, without directly interacting with the frame buffer, so the performance hit of the eight missing ROPs depends on how ROP-intensive a game is.
For example, in Starfield, the performance loss is much smaller, and in DOOM Eternal with ray tracing, the card actually ends up close to its expected performance levels.
We've also put the card through a quick 3DMark Time Spy Extreme graphics score run.
So far, we know only of Zotac 5090 Solid cards that are affected, none of our review samples from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and NVIDIA exhibit this issue, all 5090 owners should definitely check their cards and report back.
This is an issue with quality assurance at both NVIDIA and Zotac. NVIDIA's add-in card partners (AICs) do not have the ability to configure ROP counts, either physically on the silicon, or in the video BIOS, and yet the GPU, its video BIOS, and the final product, cleared QA testing at both NVIDIA and Zotac.
We are working with Zotac to return the affected card, so they can forward it to NVIDIA for investigation. At this time Zotac was unable to provide a statement, citing the fluidity of the situation. As for possible fixes. We hope the issue is localized to a bug with the driver or the video BIOS, so NVIDIA could release a user-friendly BIOS update tool that can run from within Windows and update the BIOS of the affected cards. If, however, the ROPs were disabled at the hardware-level, then there's little that end-users or even AIC partners can do, except initiating a limited product recall for replacements or refunds. If the ROPs really are disabled through fuses, it seems unlikely that NVIDIA has a way to re-enable those units in the field, because that would potentially provide details to how such units can be reactivated on other cards and SKUs from the company.
Update 14:22 UTC:
Apparently the issue isn't specific to Zotac, HXL posted a screenshot of an MSI RTX 5090D, the China-specific variant of the RTX 5090 with nerfed compute performance, but which is supposed to have 176 ROPs. Much like the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid, it has 8 missing ROPs.
Update 16:38 UTC:
Another card has been found, this time from Manli.
Update 17:30 UTC:
ComputerBase reports that their Zotac RTX 5090 Solid sample is not affected and shows the correct ROP count of 176. This confirms that the issue isn't affecting all cards of this SKU and probably not even all cards in a batch/production run.
Update 17:36 UTC:
Just to clarify, because it has been asked a couple of times. When no driver is installed, GPU-Z will use an internal database as fallback, to show a hardcoded ROP count of 176, instead of "Unknown." This is a reasonable approximation, because all previous cards had a fixed, immutable ROP count. As soon as the driver is installed, GPU-Z will report the "live" ROP counts active on the GPU—this data is read via the NVIDIA drivers.
Update 19:18 UTC:
A card from Gigabyte is affected, too.
Update Feb 22nd, 6:00 UTC:
Palit, Inno3D and MSI found to be affected as well
Update Feb 22nd, 6:30 UTC:
NVIDIA's global PR director Ben Berraondo confirmed this issue. He told The Verge:
While NVIDIA talks about "one ROP unit," this really means "8 ROPs" in our context. Many years ago, marketing decided that higher numbers = better, so they started to report the number of pixels that can be processed per unit, instead of the actual unit counts. So in this case, one hardware unit is disabled, which mean eight pixels per clock less can be processed, resulting in a loss of "8 ROPs".
Update Feb 25th:
In the meantime, some RTX 5080 GPUs with missing ROPs were found, too, NVIDIA provided the following statement to TechPowerUp:
Two days ago, one of our readers who goes by "Wuxi Gamer," posted this thread on the TechPowerUp Forums, reporting that his retail Zotac RTX 5090 Solid was showing fewer ROPs in GPU-Z than the RTX 5090 should have. The user tried everything from driver to software re-installs, to switching between the two video BIOSes the card comes with, all to no avail. What a coincidence that we had this card in our labs already, so we then dug out our sample. Lo and behold—our sample is missing ROPs, too! GPU-Z is able to read and report these units counts, in this case through NVIDIA's NVAPI driver interface. The 8 missing ROPs constitute a 4.54% loss in the GPU's raster hardware capability, and to illustrate what this means for performance, we've run a couple of tests.
A ROP (Raster Operations Pipeline) unit in the GPU processes pixel data, handling tasks like blending, antialiasing, render-to-texture, and writing final pixel values to the frame buffer. In contrast, a shading unit, aka "GPU core" is responsible for computing the color, lighting, and material properties of pixels or vertices during the rendering process, without directly interacting with the frame buffer, so the performance hit of the eight missing ROPs depends on how ROP-intensive a game is.
We've also put the card through a quick 3DMark Time Spy Extreme graphics score run.
- NVIDIA Founders Edition: 25439
- Zotac Solid: 22621
- Gigabyte Gaming OC: 26220
So far, we know only of Zotac 5090 Solid cards that are affected, none of our review samples from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and NVIDIA exhibit this issue, all 5090 owners should definitely check their cards and report back.
This is an issue with quality assurance at both NVIDIA and Zotac. NVIDIA's add-in card partners (AICs) do not have the ability to configure ROP counts, either physically on the silicon, or in the video BIOS, and yet the GPU, its video BIOS, and the final product, cleared QA testing at both NVIDIA and Zotac.
We are working with Zotac to return the affected card, so they can forward it to NVIDIA for investigation. At this time Zotac was unable to provide a statement, citing the fluidity of the situation. As for possible fixes. We hope the issue is localized to a bug with the driver or the video BIOS, so NVIDIA could release a user-friendly BIOS update tool that can run from within Windows and update the BIOS of the affected cards. If, however, the ROPs were disabled at the hardware-level, then there's little that end-users or even AIC partners can do, except initiating a limited product recall for replacements or refunds. If the ROPs really are disabled through fuses, it seems unlikely that NVIDIA has a way to re-enable those units in the field, because that would potentially provide details to how such units can be reactivated on other cards and SKUs from the company.
Update 14:22 UTC:
Update 16:38 UTC:
Update 17:30 UTC:
ComputerBase reports that their Zotac RTX 5090 Solid sample is not affected and shows the correct ROP count of 176. This confirms that the issue isn't affecting all cards of this SKU and probably not even all cards in a batch/production run.
Update 17:36 UTC:
Just to clarify, because it has been asked a couple of times. When no driver is installed, GPU-Z will use an internal database as fallback, to show a hardcoded ROP count of 176, instead of "Unknown." This is a reasonable approximation, because all previous cards had a fixed, immutable ROP count. As soon as the driver is installed, GPU-Z will report the "live" ROP counts active on the GPU—this data is read via the NVIDIA drivers.
Update 19:18 UTC:
Update Feb 22nd, 6:00 UTC:
Update Feb 22nd, 6:30 UTC:
NVIDIA's global PR director Ben Berraondo confirmed this issue. He told The Verge:
NVIDIAWe 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.Very interesting—NVIDIA confirms that RTX 5070 Ti is affected, too.
While NVIDIA talks about "one ROP unit," this really means "8 ROPs" in our context. Many years ago, marketing decided that higher numbers = better, so they started to report the number of pixels that can be processed per unit, instead of the actual unit counts. So in this case, one hardware unit is disabled, which mean eight pixels per clock less can be processed, resulting in a loss of "8 ROPs".
Update Feb 25th:
In the meantime, some RTX 5080 GPUs with missing ROPs were found, too, NVIDIA provided the following statement to TechPowerUp:
NVIDIAUpon 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.
486 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Cards Spotted with Missing ROPs, NVIDIA Confirms the Issue, Multiple Vendors Affected
Their problem though is that the customers who stand in line for hours to shell out $2000+ for a 5090 are exactly the kind of people who will notice any small thing about their new purchase.
Ouch nVidia, how much more of your BS are people willing to take?
When demand is this high and people are willing to overpay this much, what’s a few complaints? If the melting connector concern isn't making people pause, what’s a few missing ROPs gonna do to hurt sales? You can blame these companies to some degree, but as long as buyers continue to tolerate this behavior, what is going to discourage it? You don’t need even a $1000 GPU to actually play any game and enjoy it. They just have consumers right where they want them.
Even if scumbag nGreedia provided them with the shitty 5090 chips, IT WAS THEIR DUTY to refuse those incomplete chips and return them to nGreedia, not to install them ANYWAYS into a very expensive card.
There is absolutely no way or no other possibility that this is not 110% on ZOTAC.
Shameful!
Also I read above in other comments that an MSI 5090D had fewer ROPs. So, it's not just ZOTAC.
No one takes the risk of going against Nvidia in this market. When Nvidia says "jump" almost everyone asks "how high?"
Kek.
Not getting the complete ROPs count is a total scam it's like the GTX 970 fiasco if there are other cards out there missing ROPs.
Zotac had issues with customer support for quite a while, bragged about selling cards to miners during the crypto boom, yet somehow they're still an Nvidia AIB while EVGA got left to suffer after Nvidia abused them for years.And now the narrative is supply and demand, even though there's various news articles of AIB's saying there is no supply.
On the video cards market, there is currently only intel and AMD, both with sub par offerings both on hardware, also software level. Yes, nGreedia currently holds a monopoly on the GPU market, so people are buying its products because there is no other choice. If AMD would have something better than DLLS 4, 4xFrame Gen, hardware PhysX, or hardware G-SYNC equivalent, then I would jump the wagon in an instant without looking back.
I still miss the best AMD (ATI) card ever produced, the Radeon HD 5870.
Zotac: "You know these defective chips? We won't use them."
NVIDIA: "Alright, you won't get chips anymore."
Hardware G-Sync is virtually dead. Seriously ... The Dell OLED panel with hardware Gsync performed worse than the Free Sync Premium. It's practically added weight and cost now.
Hardware PhysiX is literarily dead.
As much as I think FSR 3 is fine, they have hardware FSR 4 now. But there is always an excuse around the corner.
When AMD is RUMORED that it does it - and usually it's a lie - all the Internet is uproaring.
If you don't believe me, let me quote wiz's words from Civ VII performance review.
ROPs 192
INT32 Units 5376 (if I remember right it should be full 10752 since Blackwell)
But what can AMD do "better" than Nvidia when Jensen has already won the war with proprietary software features? Reviewers already list not having DLSS as a con. Image quality with FSR3 vs. DLSS3 was massively overblown with pixel peeking in static images, 4x frame gen is useless if you need more FPS, hardware G-SYNC has nearly been replaced by Freesync, and Nvidia has mostly killed off PhsysX and has removed support for 32 bit PhsyX because screw anyone who wants to play older games that need PhysX support.I expect that is how Nvidia probably treats any AIB that isn't a top tier partner.
Even though EVGA was a top tier Nvidia partner, they were smart to get out before the sh*tstorm with the 40 series melting power connectors happened.
No, AMD did not "catch them" with Polaris or Vega. Neither was competitive at the high end with Nvidia's products, neither was polished enough to compete with Nvidia's feature set and end user experience, and neither was priced aggressively enough to make Nvidia's offerings look like overpriced nonsense. Hence, no mind share and no market share for AMD.
"AMD is just as good except for {xyz}" has been required copium for AMD fans for 13 years, and it's just that - copium. The last time AMD had a product that caught Nvidia and was just as good was the HD 7970 - 13 years ago. They have failed time and time and time again to capitalize on Nvidia's missteps, and I fully expect they will do the same here with RDNA 4.
fanboycustomer.Anyone up for a paper-launched, scalped & unavailable @ MSRP, with missing ROPs and a melting connector gpu?
@Bwaze To answer your question 5090 Sn (Tin)