While testing the next GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, TechPowerUp reviewers found lower performance than previous models they had previously reviewed. As it turned out, some of the new GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards may be equipped with chips with fewer rasterization units (ROPs), which affects the final performance. NVIDIA has already confirmed the existence of the problem.
Initially, the editors were unable to find out the reasons for the reduced performance of the Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 video card that came to their review. The actual operating frequencies corresponded to the recommended ones, and there were no obvious nuances with the efficiency of the cooling system. The possibility of a problem with the GPU was suggested by the publication of screenshots of the GPU-Z utility by one of the owners of the already retail version of the Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 video card.
User Wuxi Gamer drew attention to the reduced number of ROPs blocks registered by GPU-Z - 168 instead of 176, which the GB202 GPU should have according to the official specification. Initially, there was an assumption that this was some kind of software error. However, neither reinstalling the drivers and operating system, nor switching to another BIOS helped to correct the situation. In addition, the owner of the video card noted lower performance of his video card than in similar models of the GeForce RTX 5090 series.
After the above arguments, it became obvious that the performance problem of individual video cards arises precisely because of the GPU with fewer rasterizers. The Raster Operations Pipeline (ROP) in the GPU processes pixel data, performing tasks such as blending, anti-aliasing, rendering textures, and writing the final pixel values to the frame buffer. So some performance loss due to the lack of eight ROPs depends on how ROP-intensive the game is.
As it turned out, similar nuances of GeForce RTX 5090 models are not only characteristic of Zotac adapters. Owners of video cards from other vendors also began to receive reports of a reduced number of ROPs to 168 and a corresponding loss of performance. This applied to both GeForce RTX 5090 models and GeForce RTX 5090D modifications intended for the Chinese market.
Limit
GeForce RTX 5090/5090D models on GPUs with certain "limitations" have already been found among video cards from Zotac, Manli, Inno3D, Gigabyte, Palit, MSI, and even reference versions of the Founders Edition. And this is probably not an exhaustive list.
NVIDIA has already responded to the incident. The company's PR director, Ben Berraondo, provided a comment to The Verge.
We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% of GeForce RTX 5090/5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs that have one fewer ROP than specified. The average impact on graphics performance is 4%, with no impact on AI or compute workloads. Affected consumers can contact their graphics card manufacturer for a replacement. The manufacturing anomaly has been fixed. -- Ben Berraondo, NVIDIA
So, we are talking about certain defective versions of the GPU, which have fewer ROPs than specified in the specification. This does not affect the computing power of the GPU, but the graphics performance in such cases will be lower. Unplanned fsp losses in games. Such shortcomings cannot be fixed by updating the firmware. In general, it is surprising that such GPU instances passed the testing stages of NVIDIA and video card manufacturers.
The bad news is that the problem may also affect the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti series of graphics cards. Although no such cases have been registered yet, if this nuance is highlighted by NVIDIA representatives, then it is obviously only a matter of time and versions with GPUs with fewer ROPs could already be on sale. Graphics cards of this series appeared on the shelves only two days ago.
We recently tested one of the models of the new line. The sample of the video card that came to the review used the GPU without the mentioned problems – all 96 ROPs were in place. In this version, the forced version of the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti demonstrates results at the level of the GeFOrce RTX 4080/4080 SUPER and significantly outperforms the latter when using Multi Frame Generation (MFG). Details in the review of ASUS TUF Gaming GeForce RTX 5070 Ti OC.