By If you recently spent over a thousand dollars on a new graphics card and it doesn’t perform as you expected, you may be disappointed. Due to reports of missing ROPs on recently released cards, many buyers of new RTX 50-series GPUs are currently experiencing this. A recent statement claims that it is a manufacturing problem that is covered by the warranty.
There should be 176 ROPs (or “Render Output Units”) on the RTX 5090 and 96 on the RTX 5070 Ti. However, many social media users are reporting that they have eight fewer ROPs on their cards—168 and 88, respectively.
In the worst situations, this can lead to a noticeable decline in the final frame rate of games, with decreases of up to 10%. That may not sound like much, but it accounts for a significant portion of the difference between the current and previous card generations. And once more, these GPUs are costing folks $1,000 or more.
According to a corporate spokeswoman, “the average graphical performance impact is 4 percent, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads.” According to Nvidia, the “anomaly” has been resolved during the manufacturing process.
Nvidia advises impacted customers to initiate the RMA procedure by contacting their respective manufacturers, either Nvidia for Founder’s Edition cards or distributors such as Asus, MSI, Gigabyte, etc. The only major inconvenience is missing the GPU you spent a fortune on for a few weeks, as all cards sold this year will be covered under warranty.
However, there are multiple quality assurance issues with the most recent RTX 50-series cards. Melting power wires have been reported on multiple occasions; this also occurred with the RTX 40 series. Even though the situation is terrible for individuals impacted, I must emphasize that based on what we’ve observed thus far, your chances of actually receiving a defective card—if you can receive a card at all—remain quite low.
