Nvidia says only "0.5%" of RTX 5090 and 5070 Ti affected by missing ROPs issue

Hours after reports of some Nvidia RTX 50 series graphics shipping with missing Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs) and affecting performance, Nvidia has gone ahead and confirmed it. The hardware issue had originally been spotted on multiple versions of Nvidia's top-end RTX 5090 graphics card, but it seems it's not the only line in the RTX 50 series to be affected.

In a statement to The Verge, Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo said that this is a "rare issue affecting less than 0.5%" of its manufactured GeForce RTX 5090/5090D and 5070 Ti cards and urged affected owners to contact the manufacturer for a replacement.

Here's the full statement:

We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have one fewer ROP than specified. The average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.

First reported by TechPowerUp, the publication quickly found reports of the anomaly across Zotac, MSI, Manli, Gigabyte, Palit, and Inno3D. While the original report only found the issue on RTX 5090 and RTX 5090D cards, but Nvidia says that even the 5070 Ti is affected too. The performance hit from the missing eight ROPs can be varied, but on average it seems to make the cards perform around 4.5% slower.

Unfortunately, as this seems to be a manufacturing issue, those who are affected won't be able to fix it with a driver or BIOS update as previously hoped. Those who have RTX 5090s can check their cards for this discrepancy by booting up GPU-Z and looking at the available ROPs section, which should read 176, as listed in the specifications by Nvidia. On the RTX 5070 Ti, it should read 96 ROPs, while defective units will read 88 ROPs.

The latest debacle arrives as reports of melting power connectors continue to arrive from those who've been lucky enough to grab an RTX 5090. This is in addition to issues like black screens and crashes being investigated by Nvidia. Earlier today, a user on Reddit (Impossible-Weight485) posted that his new Astral RTX 5090 "caught on fire," supposedly due to blown capacitors while simply browsing the web.