Nvidia debuted its new RTX 50 series with the GeForce RTX 5090 in January, touting prices that begin at $1,999 for those who are lucky. This is the current highest end consumer graphics offering from the company, though it seems not every version is created equally. A new report is adding another issue to the pile of problems that's growing for Nvidia's latest hardware release.
According to a report by TechPowerUp, the 'Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid' has fewer Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs) than the cards by other well-known OEMs. The standard ROPs found in a 5090 are supposed to be 176, but the affected cards are only showing 168 in monitoring software like GPU-Z.
The GPU-Z screenshots below, from TechPowerUp, clearly show the different ROPs between the unaffected and Zotec cards. On the same screenshots, the difference seen in the Pixel Fillrates should count for the loss in performance that the cards with lower ROPs are seeing:
The publication has done testing and found that the lower number of ROPs affects performance measurably, dipping the Zotac card's raster rendering capabilities by 4.54% compared to other vendors' cards and even Nvidia's own Founders Edition card, making it weaker than every other 5090 that TechPowerUp tested. Benchmarks running Elden Ring at 4K resolution at max settings without DLSS can be seen below:
Raster Operations Pipelines, or ROPs, on a GPU are what handles the final stages of the rendering process, taking the 3D data and converting it into a 2D image for the display. This involves things like processing pixel data and antialiasing, meaning even a small change (like the missing eight ROPs in the Zotac 5090s) can mean a decent performance difference. This can change from game to game though, with lower performance hits being seen on games like Doom Eternal and Starfield by the publication.
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.
Moreover, it doesn't look like only Zotac is the only vendor that's affected by this. TechPowerUp has found a China-specific variant of the RTX 5090 named the MSI RTX 5090D is missing the same eight ROPs. More may show up now that users begin looking at their new hardware with a closer eye. As the publication points out, this may be resolved by Nvidia using a driver or BIOS update, but only if the ROPs aren't disabled at a hardware level.
Source and images: TechPowerUp
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