Monday, February 24th 2025
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Spotted with Missing ROPs, Too
We previously covered that NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti chips were spotted with a few missing ROPs. NVIDIA confirmed this issue affects 0.5% of the supply of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs, and users should contact their vendors for a replacement. However, the case of missing ROPs is now extended further, with one user on Reddit reporting that his latest GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition GPU is reading only 104 ROPs, instead of the regular 112. That is eight missing ROPs—a number similar to eight missing ROPs found on GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti. To double-check, the user installed the latest version of NVIDIA drivers and still recorded 104 ROPs only.
We previously found eight missing ROPs constitute a 4.54% loss in the GPU's raster hardware capability. The GPU's Raster Operations Pipeline (ROP) units handle the final stages of graphics processing—they manage pixel-level operations like blending colors, smoothing edges through antialiasing, writing pixels to texture memory, and ultimately storing the final pixel values in the frame buffer. This differs from shading units (GPU cores), which focus on calculating the colors, lighting effects, and material properties of pixels and vertices during rendering but don't directly work with the frame buffer. The performance loss from missing ROPs will differ from game to game, depending on whether a game heavily relies on ROP-intensive operations. Nonetheless, with GeForce RTX 5080 FE in the picture, we must wait and see if more future SKUs may appear with missing ROPs.
Update Feb 25th:
In response to this discovery, NVIDIA provided the following statement to TechPowerUp
Sources:
Reddit, via VideoCardz
We previously found eight missing ROPs constitute a 4.54% loss in the GPU's raster hardware capability. The GPU's Raster Operations Pipeline (ROP) units handle the final stages of graphics processing—they manage pixel-level operations like blending colors, smoothing edges through antialiasing, writing pixels to texture memory, and ultimately storing the final pixel values in the frame buffer. This differs from shading units (GPU cores), which focus on calculating the colors, lighting effects, and material properties of pixels and vertices during rendering but don't directly work with the frame buffer. The performance loss from missing ROPs will differ from game to game, depending on whether a game heavily relies on ROP-intensive operations. Nonetheless, with GeForce RTX 5080 FE in the picture, we must wait and see if more future SKUs may appear with missing ROPs.
In response to this discovery, 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.
60 Comments on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5080 Spotted with Missing ROPs, Too
Thou doth downplayest too much.
They could fix all that with rewriting specification "up to 112 ROP".
:p
I mean, didn't AMD try to wiggle out of their Ryzen 3000 debacle, where most CPUs didn't achieve advertised boost clock by claiming they aren't guaranteed, just theoretical maximums?
Who's gonna notice a couple of percent performance drop when you usually don't have the same configuration as reviewers, a lot of reviews are done with internal benchmarking tools and tracks and not game implemented ones that could be compared at home... Also, it's rare now to see synthetic benchmark results, "since they aren't games" - I think TechPowerUp reviews only include 3D Mark Time Spy result in overclocking sections?
That's why there's always a base clock speed mentioned, turbo is actually OCing & not guaranteed.