Recently, reports have surfaced revealing that some GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards are being shipped with fewer Raster Output Pipelines (ROPs) than promised. The significance of ROPs in graphics cards cannot be overstated as they are crucial for tasks like anti-aliasing. Alarm bells were raised when tests using GPU-Z indicated that affected RTX 5090 units were showing only 168 ROPs instead of the standard 178. Although this discrepancy accounts for a mere 4.5% difference, benchmarking has shown that it can lead to over 5% dips in performance.
It appears that only a small fraction, specifically 0.5%, of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti, RTX 5090D, and RTX 5090 units are affected by this issue. Microsoft engineers at Nvidia have flagged this as a ‘production anomaly’ but assure that it has been addressed. However, it is possible that some of these substandard cards might still be in store inventories or shipped to customers.
For those consumers who find themselves with one of these underperforming cards, Nvidia advises contacting the board manufacturers for a replacement. Nvidia has reassured its users that this issue primarily impacts graphical performance, reducing it by an average of 4%. There isn’t any negative effect reported on AI and Compute workloads. This proactive approach by Nvidia aims to ensure that users receive the performance they expect and deserve from their RTX 5090 purchases.
This development serves as a reminder for consumers to be vigilant about their hardware’s specifications and performance, especially when issues like these emerge in the tech world.
