RTX 5090: Now Nvidia also has a problem with defective chips

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Flo
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The negative headlines about the RTX 5090 just don’t stop: several users report a smaller number of ROPs than originally advertised.

The bad news surrounding the RTX 5090 just won’t stop.

Starting with insufficient availability, which is causing horrendous dealer and street prices, to recurring reports of melting connectors, to driver problems at release that initially rendered the RTX 5090 virtually unusable, the Nvidia flagship has had a turbulent start.

To make matters worse, a chip problem is now also apparent in Nvidia’s flagship product.

As the portal TechPowerUp first reported, their test sample of a Zotac Geforce TX 5090 Solid has fewer active ROPs (“Render Output Units”) than it should have.

  • This was noticed using the otherwise useful tool GPU-Z. The aforementioned custom GPU only showed 168 active ROPs here – according to the official Nvidia data sheet, however, there should be 176.
  • On the Discord server of our colleagues from ComputerBase, an owner of such a Zotac RTX 5090 Solid also reported that not all ROPs were active.

    • A brief tech digression: Render Output Units are crucial components of the graphics pipeline that are responsible for the final image calculation. They process pixel and depth information, perform anti-aliasing, and write the data to the framebuffer.

    The higher the ROP count, the more pixels per clock cycle can be processed – a direct performance factor, especially at high resolutions and in complex scenes. A reduction to 168 units theoretically means a capacity loss of 4.54 percent; the actual performance loss in synthetic benchmarks can be as high as 11 percent.

    Assumption: “Small batch with defective chips”

    TechPowerUp’s assumption that only Zotac GPUs are affected quickly turned out to be a mistake. ComputerBase itself, for example, tested the same model and found the correct number of ROPs.

    The situation is only getting more complicated as a result: on the X platform, an increasing number of RTX 5090 owners are reporting the same problem. The affected custom GPUs are various models from Gigabyte, MSI, and Manli. Even Nvidia’s own Founders Edition does not seem to be spared from the problem.

    At the time of publication, Nvidia has not issued a statement, so we now have to venture into the realm of speculation. The well-informed leaker MegaSizeGPU believes, for example, that “a small batch with defective chips” was delivered, which is now becoming noticeable.

    The worst-case scenario (for Nvidia) is as follows: Should the eight affected ROPs be disabled on the hardware side , it will result in a major recall. In this case, custom partners would probably be less to blame, since ROP configurations are predefined by Nvidia; so the problem slipped through quality control.

    It is not yet known whether the RTX 5080 is also affected.