- Nvidia has confirmed that approximately 1 in 200 of its GPU RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 TI have a problem with their graphics chips
- The problem is a loss of Rops, a key element of the internal functioning of the GPU.
- Nvidia says that those with an affected graphics card should communicate with the manufacturer to organize a replacement
After the reports of some RTX 5090 GPUs that do not work as well as they should in the Games, Nvidia has confirmed that there is a problem with the chips on the Blackwell flagship, as well as the RTX 5070 TI GPU recently arrived.
This is a problem at the hardware level, which means that it is a deep failure in the chip that cannot be solved, and is slowing down these graphics cards due to an appreciable amount (although variable).
In a statement that addresses the matter, Nvidia told Verge: “We have identified a rare problem that affects less than 0.5% (half percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090d and 5070 you that have a rop less than the specified.
“The average graphic performance impact is 4%, without impact on AI and calculations workloads. Affected consumers can contact the Board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.”
Your first question can be: What is a rop, then? Rop means Pipeline of Raster Operations, and this is a hardware that is a key part of the process of representing the graphics for the games of your PC. (It is much more complicated than that, in reality, but that is all you really need to know).
With less of those pipes available to treat relevant graphics processing tasks during the game, as expected, performance is a bit slower.
In addition, if asked about the RTX 5090D mentioned, that is the variant of the Blackwell flagship sold in China, which was involved in the initial reports of this problem, however, the RTX 5070 TI was not.
All this episode was developed yesterday, after the first time courtesy of the Techpowerup review of a Zotac Rtx 5090 solid graphics card (through Videocardz).
In its review, the technology site discovered that this third -party model had a lower performance in some way compared to an edition of Fundadores Nvidia RTX 5090 (the performance baseline used by Techpowerup to measure the relative power of GPU variants insignia).
In fact, the Zotac RTX 5090 was about 5% slower than the NVIDIA model, while executing the same watch speeds, which obviously did not make much sense. Not until Techpowerup investigated and discovered that this was not a problem related to defective cooling (or other probable root causes), but in fact the Zotac GPU lacked Rops.
The RTX 5090 graphics card showed 168 ROP enabled (in the GPU-Z utility) instead of the expected count (and official specifications) of 176 Rops.
All suppliers are potentially affected by this Gremlin in process, of course, since this is a problem with the chips produced by NVIDIA, and sent to external partners to be used in the manufacture of their graphics cards. That was quickly shown yesterday when the reports began to arrive, when people began to verify their meetings for this problem.
Ok, MSI, Manli, Zotac … gigabyte pic.twitter.com/nlho1dkjloFebruary 21, 2025
While in his statement, Nvidia mentions the lack of a rop, refers to a block of them, so, as observed, the Rop count is reduced by eight (the number in a block) with graphics cards that have This problem.
How to verify if your Blackwell GPU could be affected
To verify your RTX 5090 or 5070 TI, you can turn on a tool that moves deeply into the bowels of your hardware, monitoring and informing about multiple elements of the specification. Obviously, what is looking for is the Rops count, and that can be provided by GPU-Z as already mentioned, or an alternative utility like Hwinfo (and probably another software, no doubt).
In GPU-Z, you will find the ROPS number appears on the graphics card tab, on the seventh line down, on the left side (we have an explanatory here, if you want more details about GPU-Z). For RTX 5090, the number must be 176, while 168 is what the deteriorated flagship models show. With the RTX 5070 TI, the correct specification is 96 ROP, so in theory, it will be reduced to 88 ROP (but I have not yet seen confirmation of that, so it might have less impact).
If you have a RTX 5090 or 5070 you with this problem, how much will it affect you in practical terms? Well, that varies as I mentioned, although as indicated, the average impact is a loss of performance of something in the order of 5% (or by others, Nvidia says 4%).
However, you may not notice any difference in some cases, since a game can use the aforementioned pipes (Rops) more strongly, while another can touch them at all. Therefore, some games could slow down in more than 5%, and others may have an insignificant loss in picture speeds (such a low impact that I could never say).
However, before thinking that this may not be so important after all, be sure that yes. First, a failure like this should not have reduced the quality guarantee and reach the production hardware. And when he remembers how much buyers have forbidden for the RTX 5090 in particular, the MSRP is a real wallet, and many people have paid excessively beyond that, well, you can begin to see how this is a great disappointment.
If you have an RTX 5090 or RTX 5070 TI, see your GPU-Z graphics card as described above. If your model shows a loss of Rops, as Nvidia advised, communicate with the manufacturer of your board and begin the process of replacing the graphics card.
However, that could be a problematic issue, for those who may have sold their old GPU when they were updated (if they need to return the defective blackwell graphics card before receiving a new one, and they remain with a PC for games without an engine, essentially ). The other concern is that it is not as if the fresh stock was easy to get, either, at this time.
Future GPUs should not suffer this problem because, as Nvidia observes, the ‘production anomaly’ has been solved here, as they hope.
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