NVIDIA's stellar quality control with the $2,000 GeForce RTX 5090 saw quite a few customers end up with cards that had fewer ROPs than they should—168 as opposed to its original spec of 176. The 8 fewer ROPs results in a roughly 5% drop in performance. When you're ponying up over two grand, this is the last thing you want. But what if we told you there are cards out there were more ROPs than they should have? We have with us an ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 LC graphics card that we detected 192 ROPs on. That's right, the card has all the 192 ROPs active that are present in the "GB202" silicon, or two ROP partitions (16 ROPs) more than it should have. We received our ROG Astral RTX 5090 LC sample just a few weeks ago, and haven't had time to thoroughly test it yet, because we're in the middle of a full retest with new games and new drivers.

The ASUS ROG Astral LC is a factory overclocked card, with ASUS giving the card a generous OC to benefit from the liquid cooling solution (2580 MHz boost vs. 2407 MHz reference or +7.1%). To account for that, we tried our best to clock the card back down to reference specs, which is presented as the orange bar. This still isn't the same card as the RTX 5090 Founders Edition, because the superior cooling solution and power limits mean that the GPU enjoys better boost frequency residency, but this is as close as we can get to simulating reference spec. We ran the card through a battery of game tests, which show an average of 8% performance gains over the RTX 5090 Founders Edition.

After just a few weeks from our initial report of missing ROPs on NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" for desktop, it appears that the laptop versions of these GPUs could also be prone to the same issue: missing ROP (Raster Operations Pipeline) units, which degrades performance by up to 14%. According to the German publication Heise Online, NVIDIA is working with laptop manufacturers to inspect any case of missing ROPs on its GeForce RTX 50 series cards, which the company claims affect only 0.5% of the entire supply. To avoid giving consumers GPUs with missing ROPs, NVIDIA is working overtime with OEMs to ensure that the GPUs are correctly operating and offering the hardware true to the specification sheet.

With NVIDIA Blackwell laptop SKUs announced at CES and pre-orders in February, NVIDIA expected to hand these GPUs through its partner laptop manufacturers to consumers in March, but it's currently scheduled for April, which is a whole month later. Here is what Heise Online said:

As we have learned from several notebook manufacturers, they are currently working overtime in the Far East to prevent the drama from escalating into the next act: NVIDIA has instructed manufacturers to inspect already-produced notebooks with the new mobile GeForce RTX 5000 graphics chips. The focus is on GPUs where fewer ROPs are active than specified in the datasheet. This can lead to potentially significant losses in 3D performance.

Last month, TechPowerUp was heavily involved in the identification of missing ROPs across newly released GeForce RTX 50-series graphics cards. NVIDIA, board partners and system integrators have (largely) acknowledged these issues. Certain companies have initiated the processing of customer returned units, but a pre-built PC specialist—CyberPowerPC—revealed a more proactive approach when dealing with less-than-pedigree hardware. Corsair has weighed in on the matter, since its ORIGIN and Vengeance businesses are involved in the building and sale of modern gaming rigs. A company rep—CorsairLucky—provided some insight on their official subreddit: "upon learning of this issue, we immediately implemented a thorough review of the detailed production reports for each system shipped to date. Matching the expected breadth of this issue, we have identified only one customer with an affected GPU and are actively working with them to provide a replacement."

Team Green posits that only 0.5% of released "Blackwell" GPU-based products are affected, Corsair's statement also refers to this percentage statistic. Several media outlets have posited that NVIDIA has produced a "conjectured" figure—in particular, the claimed 0.5% stat was questioned by Gamers Nexus. According to VideoCardz's inside track, NVIDIA's launch of GeForce RTX 5070 cards was delayed due to a number of factors—including lower than expected ROP counts. Earlier today, Team Green confirmed that its GeForce RTX 5070 Founders Edition launch window has been pushed into "late March."

News outlets have provided detailed coverage of NVIDIA's rocky launch of GeForce RTX 50-series graphics card over the past month, but the latest major problem was documented late last week. In the interim, TechPowerUp's original article has been updated six times (at the time of writing)—demonstrating the fluid nature of this sorry situation. Team Green and involved board partners—are now—acutely aware of the "missing ROPs" controversy, following an absorption of strong backlashes from frustrated owners and the larger PC gaming hardware community. Thanks to a reader's tip-off, VideoCardz has highlighted a system integrator's compelling new initiative—very likely put in place in order to avoid customer dissatisfaction.

The aforementioned VideoCardz audience member spotted an interesting new tag on CyberPowerPC's system builder webpage. The PC pre-build specialist company stated that it: "will ensure all systems equipped with GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti video cards have the correct number of ROPs before shipping". CyberPowerPC QA staffers are likely utilizing version 2.64.0 of TechPowerUp's GPU-Z tool to check for unwanted anomalies—a simple and very quick process. Industry experts believe that system integrators are taking matters into their own hands, thus avoiding complicated and time-sapping processing of RMAs. The so-called "ROPGate" scandal is expected to last for a while.