Seems like so far, as far as anybody knows, only the Zotac “Solid” cards are affected.
First paragraph reads:
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.
Just imagine spending 4k€ on a graphics card only to find it’s partially defect.
Even better, imagine spending that with a scalper who isn’t going to honour a warranty.
For those not clicking through and reading all the way to the bottom:
More cards are apparently affected, they say Nvidia acknowledged the issue, is telling them that users can get a replacement from the manufacturer and that they’ve addressed the root cause for future units.
The root cause was NVIDIA trying to peddle defective dies because they decided to slot up every SKU to dig more money out of their regarded fans. That cut-down 5090 would likely be sold as a 5080. The current xx70xx skus are 5060s in reality and so on and so forth. In all honesty, you get what you deserve. As soon as the hobby became popular, sense and knowledgeable user went out the window.
Man, I am as frustrated with Nvidia as anybody, but that type of vaguely-informed ranting really makes me go on the defensive.
For one thing, the dumb gatekeeping at the end is absurd. I’ve been building PCs since the early 90s, there are more informed users now than there have ever been, by far. And those that aren’t regurgitate whatever they hear on Youtube from tech influencers anyway. Fortnite casuals aren’t what’s keeping you from owning a 5090, friend.
Speaking of uninformed users regurgitating half-understood Youtube talking points, Nvidia certainly wasn’t going to ship 5090s with a single damaged ROP unit as 5080s, those two cards are built on entirely different dies. It’s very likely that they’ll have some 5080SuperTi thing coming out eventually perhaps built on cut down GB202 instead of the GB203 in the base model, but it’d certainly not be cutting down an ROP and leaving everything else the same. That’s not even the 5090D spec. Plus Nvidia confirms other cards in the 50 series are also affected.
More importantly, neither of us knows how these made it to market. There’s certainly at the very least some lax QA, and I’m sure there was pressure to get as many of the very limited 5090s to retail as possible, but crappy as the 50 series is in many areas I genuinely doubt Nvidia would be so dumb as to deliberately putting chips with this very specific, very consistent fault in the pipes hoping nobody would notice a performance drop and peek at GPU-Z even once. That’s not how this works. I’d love to know what actually happened to cause this, though.
So yes, the 40 and 50 series are named one step too high on the stack. Yes, the pricing increases have been wild, and it’s frustrating that demand is high enough to support it and regulators aren’t stepping in to moderate the MSRP mishandling. Yes, Nvidia mismanaged the 50 series launch in multiple ways, from bad connector design to rushing the 5090 to misleading marketing on frame generation and probably underbaked drivers. That doesn’t mean every issue is the same issue, and it certainly doesn’t mean that a lack of “knowledgeable users” is to blame.
ROP?
Basically, the ROPs are in charge of the final stage of rendering a frame.
They are discrete, physical components of the GPU.
GPUs at this point are quite complex boards of many specialized kinds of processors passing information to and from each other.
Tensor cores, RT cores, CUDA cores, ROPs, etc… these are all specialized processors, specializing in different kinds of computations.
ROPs, Raster Output Processors, do varying kinds of postprocessing on the almost final stage of a rendered frame, assemble the data from other parts of the GPU and then push the finalized, rastered pixels to the frame buffer.
A rough analogy would that ROPs are in charge of the final editing pass on a paper or article before it’s published, with the analagous ‘research’, ‘fact verifying’, and ‘rough draft’ having already been done by other parts of the GPU first.
Maybe another analogy would be that ROPs are the ‘final assembly’ of a frame, if constructing a frame was like building a car or aircraft.
A simpler, more literal explanation is that the ROPs perform the final stage of rendering a frame before the GPU actually pushes it out for you to see.
So… if the GPU is missing 8 ROPs… the GPU is basically bottlenecking itself, internally.
The article is terribly written, you need to scroll way down in the article to find out what ROP means, despite the article using the acronym several times
I figure there’s a reason that Zotac and PNY are always the cheapest cards. No idea why anybody would care about the tiny saving if they’re wasting $2k on a GPU…
Zotac and PNY don’t make the chips, NVIDIA at fault here. Some people care because they don’t actually have a ton of money, but gaming is their hobby and they’ve saved up 2-3 years so they can afford a high end card because it’s worth it to them the extra $50 or $100 represents the difference between being able to afford the card and not, or maybe having a couple of extra games to play on it.
