- Nvidia has confirmed that about 1 in 200 of its RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 TI GPUs have a problem with their graphics chips
- The problem is a loss of rops, a key element of GPU’s inner work
- Nvidia says that with an affected graphics card they need to contact the manufacturer to arrange a replacement
After reporting some RTX 5090 GPUs that won’t do as well as they should be in play, Nvidia has confirmed that there is a problem with chips in the Blackwell flagship as well as the newly arrived RTX 5070 Ti GPU.
This is a hardware level problem, which means it is a mistake deep in the chip that cannot be corrected and it slows down these graphics cards with a noticeable (albeit variable) amount.
In a statement relating to the case, Nvidia said to The Verge: “We have identified a rare problem affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have a fewer rop than specified.
“The average graphic performance effect is 4%without influence on AI and calculating workloads. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly is corrected.”
Your first question may well be: What is a rop then? ROP stands for Raster Operations Pipeline, and this is hardware that is an important part of the process of reproducing the graphics for your PC games. (It’s much more complicated than that in reality, but that’s all you really need to know).
With fewer of the pipelines available to handle the relevant graphics processing tasks during gameplay, it is surprisingly a little slower.
If you are wondering about the mentioned RTX 5090D, it is the variant of the Blackwell flagship that was sold in China, which was involved in the initial reports of this number – especially the RTX 5070 ten was not.
This whole episode unfolded yesterday, after first emerging with the permission of Techpowerup’s review of a ZOTAC RTX 5090 Solid graphics card (via Videocardz).
In its review, the tech site found that this third-party model was somehow underpinned versus a NVIDIA RTX 5090 Founders Edition (Performance Baseline used by TechPowerup to measure the relative power of the flagship GPU variants).
In fact, the ZOTAC RTX 5090 was about 5% slower than Nvidia’s own model while running at the same watch speed, which obviously didn’t make much sense. Not before TechPowerup investigated and found that this was not a problem that related to defective cooling (or other probable apparent root causes), but actually that Zotac GPU lacked rops.
The RTX 5090 graphics card showed the 168 ROPS enabled (in the GPU-Z tool) rather than the expected number (and official spec) of 176 rops.
All suppliers are potentially affected by this Gremlin in the works, of course, as this is a problem with chips produced by NVIDIA and sent to third -party partners to be used to make their graphics cards. It was quickly shown yesterday when reports began to come in as people began to control their boards of this question.
OK ， £ MSI, manli, zotac … gigabyte pic.twitter.com/nlho1dkjloFebruary 21, 2025
While Nvidia, in its statement, mentions the lack of a rop, it refers to a block of them, as observed, the ROP number is reduced by eight (the number in a block) with graphics card that has this problem.
How to check if your Blackwell GPU can be affected
To check your RTX 5090 or 5070 ten, you can shoot a tool that looks deep into the inside of your hardware, monitors and reports back on multiple items in spec. Obviously what you’re looking for is the ROPS count, and it can be provided by GPU-Z as already mentioned, or an alternative tool like HWINFO (and probably other software out there, no doubt).
In the GPU-Z you will find the ROPS number listed in the graphics card tab on the seventh line down, over to the left (we have an explanation here if you want further details about GPU-Z). For RTX 5090, the number must be 176, whereas 168 is what the reduced flagship models show. With the RTX 5070 Ti, the correct spec 96 rops are, so in theory it will be reduced to 88 rops (but I haven’t seen confirmation of it yet, so maybe it could have less influence).
If you have an RTX 5090 or 5070 Ten with this problem, how much will it affect you practical? It varies, as I have already mentioned, although the average effect as stated is a performance loss of something in the order of 5% (or so – nvidia says 4%).
However, you can not notice any difference at all in some cases, as a game can use the pipelines (ROPS) more vigorously, while another cannot touch them at all. So some games could be reduced by more than 5%and others may have an insignificant loss in image vendors (such a low influence that you would never be able to tell).
Before you have to think that this may not be that big, you can be sure it is. An error like this should not have cleared quality assurance and made it into production hardware in the first place. And when you remember how much buyers have gaffed especially the RTX 5090-is MSRP a real wallet, and many people have too much paid beyond that-yes, you can start to see how this is a big lightdown.
If you have an RTX 5090 or RTX 5070 TI, check your graphics card in GPU-Z as described above. If your model shows a loss of rops as recommended by NVIDIA, contact your board manufacturer and start the process of getting graphics card replaced.
However, it can be a troublesome case for those who may have sold their old GPU as they upgraded (if they need to send back the defective Blackwell graphics card before receiving a new one -and sitting with a game -pc without an engine, essentially). The other concern is that it is not like that fresh stock will be easy to come up with, not right now.
Future GPUs should not suffer from this question, because as Nvidia observes, ‘Production Anomaly’ is here corrected as you would hope.
