Nvidia Admits ‘Rare Issue’ of Compute Unit Shortages on GeForce RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti

Nvidia has acknowledged that some GeForce RTX 5090/RTX 5090D graphics cards already shipped to the market were found to be equipped with defective GB202 GPUs, which are missing eight raster processing units (ROPs). The company also said that the issue has affected RTX 5070 Ti models as well.

Image source: TechPowerUp

Earlier, it was reported that some owners of GeForce RTX 5090/RTX 5090D video cards from Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte and Manli complained that their accelerators’ GPUs lack rasterization units. Instead of the required 176 ROPs, their cards have only 168 of these units. Since ROPs are one of the key components of a video card, their absence negatively affects the GPU’s performance. Tests by the TechPowerUp portal showed that the Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid with a lack of ROPs is inferior in gaming performance even to the reference RTX 5090 Founders Edition. The lack of ROPs is not associated with any problem in the operation of the video card’s BIOS – we are talking about a hardware defect in the GPU.

Nvidia’s comment on the situation with the defective GeForce RTX 5090/RTX 5090D and RTX 5070 Ti was received by popular video blogger JayzTwoCents:

«”We have discovered a rare issue where less than 0.5% of GeForce RTX 5090/RTX 5090D and RTX 5070 Ti graphics cards shipped have fewer ROPs than their specs state. The average loss in [gaming] performance from missing ROPs is 4%. The lack of ROPs does not impact AI performance or compute capability. Affected owners should contact their graphics card manufacturer for a replacement. The manufacturing anomaly has been resolved,” JayzTwoCents quotes an Nvidia representative as saying.

The company did not clarify how many missing ROPs are in question in the case of the RTX 5070 Ti models. As a reminder, the GB203-300 graphics chip, which serves as the basis for the RTX 5070 Ti, has 96 ROPs.