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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:
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".
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
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.
- 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:
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:
NVIDIA said:
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".
View at TechPowerUp Main Site
