- Nvidia has confirmed that roughly 1 in 200 of its RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs have a difficulty with their graphics chips
- The issue is a lack of ROPs, a key ingredient of the inside workings of the GPU
- Nvidia says these with an affected graphics card ought to contact the maker to rearrange a alternative
Following stories of some RTX 5090 GPUs failing to carry out in addition to they need to in gaming, Nvidia has confirmed that there’s a difficulty with the chips within the Blackwell flagship, in addition to the newly arrived RTX 5070 Ti GPU.
This can be a hardware-level drawback, that means it is a fault deep within the chip which may’t be fastened, and it is slowing down these graphics playing cards by an considerable (albeit variable) quantity.
In a press release addressing the matter, Nvidia advised The Verge: “We have now recognized a uncommon problem affecting lower than 0.5% (half a %) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have one fewer ROP than specified.
“The common graphical efficiency impression is 4%, with no impression on AI and Compute workloads. Affected shoppers can contact the board producer for a alternative. The manufacturing anomaly has been corrected.”
Your first query might be: what’s a ROP, then? ROP stands for Raster Operations Pipeline, and that is {hardware} that’s a key a part of the method of rendering the graphics in your PC video games. (It’s much more sophisticated than that, in actuality, however that’s all you really want to know).
With fewer of these pipelines out there to take care of the related graphics processing duties throughout gameplay, unsurprisingly, efficiency is a bit slower.
Additionally, if you happen to’re questioning concerning the talked about RTX 5090D, that is the variant of the Blackwell flagship offered in China, which was concerned within the preliminary stories of this problem – notably the RTX 5070 Ti wasn’t, although.
This entire episode unfolded yesterday, having first emerged courtesy of TechPowerUp’s evaluate of a Zotac RTX 5090 Stable graphics card (by way of VideoCardz).
In its evaluate, the tech web site discovered that this third-party mannequin was by some means underperforming versus an Nvidia RTX 5090 Founders Version (the efficiency baseline utilized by TechPowerUp in gauging the relative energy of the flagship GPU variants).
Certainly, the Zotac RTX 5090 was round 5% slower than Nvidia’s personal mannequin, whereas operating on the identical clock speeds, which clearly didn’t make a lot sense. Not till TechPowerUp investigated and located this wasn’t a difficulty pertaining to defective cooling (or different likely-seeming root causes), however in truth that the Zotac GPU was lacking ROPs.
The RTX 5090 graphics card was displaying 168 ROPs enabled (within the GPU-Z utility) quite than the anticipated rely (and official spec) of 176 ROPs.
All distributors are probably affected by this gremlin within the works, after all, as this is a matter with the chips produced by Nvidia, and despatched to third-party companions for use within the manufacturing of their graphics playing cards. That was swiftly proven yesterday as stories began to come back in, as people began checking their boards for this problem.
okay，MSI, Manli, ZOTAC…GIGABYTE https://t.co/sYxEoydTNJ pic.twitter.com/NLHO1DkjlOFebruary 21, 2025
Whereas in its assertion, Nvidia mentions the shortage of 1 ROP, it’s referring to 1 block of them, in order noticed, the ROP rely is diminished by eight (the quantity in a block) with graphics playing cards which have this problem.
test in case your Blackwell GPU is perhaps affected
To test your RTX 5090 or 5070 Ti, you possibly can fireplace up a device that friends deep into the innards of your {hardware}, monitoring and reporting again on a number of components of the spec. Clearly what you’re in search of is the ROPs rely, and that may be supplied by GPU-Z as already talked about, or another utility like HWiNFO (and doubtless different software program on the market, little doubt).
In GPU-Z, you’ll discover the ROPs quantity listed within the Graphics Card tab, on the seventh line down, over on the left-hand facet (we’ve bought an explainer right here, if you’d like additional particulars on GPU-Z). For the RTX 5090, the quantity needs to be 176, whereas 168 is what the impaired flagship fashions are displaying. With the RTX 5070 Ti, the right spec is 96 ROPs, so in concept, will probably be diminished to 88 ROPs (however I have never seen affirmation of that but, so maybe it might have much less of an impression).
In case you do have an RTX 5090 or 5070 Ti with this drawback, how a lot will it have an effect on you in sensible phrases? Nicely, that varies as I already talked about, though as acknowledged the typical impression is a efficiency lack of one thing within the order of 5% (or thereabouts – Nvidia is saying 4%).
Nonetheless, it’s possible you’ll not discover any distinction in any respect in some circumstances, as one recreation could use the talked about pipelines (ROPs) extra closely, whereas one other could hardly contact them in any respect. So some video games may very well be slowed down by greater than 5%, and others could have a negligible loss in body charges (such a low impression you’d by no means have the ability to inform).
Nonetheless, earlier than you go pondering that perhaps this is not such a giant deal in any case, relaxation assured, it’s. A fault like this could not have cleared high quality assurance and made it into manufacturing {hardware} within the first place. And whenever you recall how a lot patrons have forked out for the RTX 5090 particularly – the MSRP is a real wallet-worrier, and many of us have overpaid past that – effectively, you can begin to see how it is a huge letdown.
You probably have an RTX 5090 or RTX 5070 Ti, test your graphics card in GPU-Z as outlined above. In case your mannequin is displaying a lack of ROPs, as suggested by Nvidia, contact your board producer and start the method of getting the graphics card changed.
That may very well be a difficult matter, although, for individuals who could have offered their outdated GPU after they upgraded (if they should ship the defective Blackwell graphics card again, earlier than receiving a brand new one – and are left with a gaming PC with out an engine, primarily). The opposite fear is that it isn’t like recent inventory goes to be simple to come back by, both, proper now.
Future GPUs should not endure from this problem as a result of as Nvidia observes, the ‘manufacturing anomaly’ right here has been fastened, as you’d hope.
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