Nvidia recently confirmed that some GeForce RTX 5090/RTX 5090D and RTX 5070 Ti graphics cards were found to have defective GPUs that are missing raster processing units (ROPs). The company said that only 0.5% of graphics cards were found to have defective GPUs. As it turns out, the issue also affected RTX 5080 models.
Image source: VideoCardz
On the Reddit forum, one user shared a screenshot of the GPU-Z utility with data for their RTX 5080 graphics card, which is missing eight rasterization units. Instead of the required 112 ROPs, the program shows that the GPU has only 104 rasterization units. According to the user, the reference version of the RTX 5080 Founders Edition was defective. Interestingly, all defective GeForce RTX 5090/RTX 5090D and RTX 5070 Ti are also missing exactly eight ROPs. The GeForce RTX 5090(D) has 168 instead of the required 176, and the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti has 88 instead of the required 96.
A defective RTX 5080. Image source: Reddit / gingeraffe90
As already noted, the lack of rasterization units directly affects the performance of video cards in games and synthetic benchmarks. In the GeForce RTX 5090/RTX 5090D, the lack of ROPs leads to a decrease in performance by 5-8%, and in the RTX 5070 Ti, performance in synthetic tests drops to 11% (game tests have not yet been conducted). It is not yet known how much the performance of the defective RTX 5080 has dropped due to the lack of ROPs.
It should be added that the lack of 8 ROPs in the RTX 5080 was confirmed by validating the data in GPU-Z. The owner of the card also reinstalled the graphics driver to make sure that the problem was not software-related.