Some RTX 50-series GPUs are missing ROP hardware, Nvidia confirms

If you’ve just dropped more than a grand on a new graphics card, you might be miffed if it fails to live up to expected performance. More than a few buyers of new RTX 50-series GPUs are feeling that right now after reports of missing ROPs on brand-new cards. According to a new statement, it’s a manufacturing defect — and it’s covered under warranty.

A ROP is a “Render Output Unit” and there are supposed to be 176 of them on the RTX 5090 and 96 on the RTX 5070 Ti. But numerous users on social media are reporting 8 fewer ROPs on their cards: 168 and 88, respectively. This can result in a very visible loss in final FPS performance for games, up to 10 percent drops in the worst cases. That might not seem like a lot, but that’s a big part of the delta between the current generation of cards and the last… and again, people are spending a thousand bucks or more on these GPUs.

According to an Nvidia statement issued to Tom’s Hardware, it’s a problem with quality assurance. Nvidia calls it a “rare issue” that only affects 0.5 percent (1 in 200) of manufactured GPUs. That’s definitely enough to pop up for end users. And even with the most miserly estimates on cards delivered to retailers, that’ll still be a few hundred or thousand cards affected — for the most dedicated early adopters who will notice that they’re not getting the performance they paid for.

“The average graphical performance impact is 4 percent, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads,” a company spokesperson said. Nvidia claims that the “anomaly” has been fixed on the manufacturing end.

Nvidia recommends that affected buyers contact their respective manufacturers — either Nvidia itself for Founder’s Edition cards or vendors like Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. — to begin the RMA process. Since all the cards sold this year will be covered under warranty, the only real headache is being without the GPU you paid an arm and a leg to get your hands on for several weeks.

The latest RTX 50-series cards are seeing more than one quality assurance issue, though. Several reports have come through of melting power cables, something that also happened on the RTX 40-series. Yet, as awful as the situation is for those affected, I have to stress that your odds of actually getting a defective card (if you can get a card at all) are still pretty slim based on what we’ve seen so far.