Nvidia RTX 5080 joins growing list of Blackwell GPUs missing ROP units

[midian182]

Facepalm: It's another day, another piece of bad news for Nvidia's Blackwell consumer graphics cards. After it was reported that RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti units from multiple vendors were missing ROP units, the first case of an RTX 5080 with the same issue has surfaced.

Redditor gingeraffe90 posted a GPU-Z screenshot of his RTX 5080 specs. The listed number of Raster Operations Pipeline (ROP) units in the card is 104, but it's supposed to be 112.

It's believed that this is the fifth case of an RTX 5000-series card missing ROPs, but the first instance of an RTX 5080 missing the components.

Reports arrived over the weekend of customers who had bought RTX 5090 cards – from multiple board partners – and discovered the GPUs came with 168 ROP units instead of 178. This impacted performance by up to five percent, depending on the workload. Some games saw a noticeable FPS decrease, especially Elden Ring, while others, including Starfield and Doom Eternal, saw almost no performance declines.

Nvidia later confirmed an issue had affected less than half a percent of RTX 5090, 5090D, and 5070 Ti GPUs, which shipped with at least one ROP missing. The company added that it could affect gaming performance by four percent, but AI and compute performance were unaffected.

Nvidia said the manufacturing problem had been corrected and advised all affected customers to contact the board vendor that made the card.

While Nvidia didn't name the RTX 5080 as also being impacted, it seems at least one of the $999 (Founders Edition) cards has also been affected. The specs of gingeraffe90's RTX 5080 have been validated, leaving the question: did Nvidia purposely not mention the card in its statement, hoping that affected owners wouldn't notice the problem?

ROP units play a key role in rasterization by handling final pixel processing, including blending, depth testing, and writing rendered pixels to the framebuffer.

It's just another reason in the long list of why the RTX 5000 series is proving to be one of Nvidia's most disappointing GPU generations in years. In addition to the small generational performance uplifts, melting connectors, and non-existent stock levels, there were reports recently that Nvidia is now investigating RTX 50-series crashes and black screen issues.

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Nvidia RTX 5080 joins growing list of Blackwell GPUs missing ROP units

 

[gamerk2]

I'm assuming this is a manufacturing defect that is making those ROPs unusable, as opposed to them being not there?

 

[user556]

I was under the impression these are the Chinese nerf'd models. Which would make them switched out parts I guess. With the fully spec'd parts actually delivered to China.

 

[godrilla]

I'm assuming this is a manufacturing defect that is making those ROPs unusable, as opposed to them being not there?

Questionable the long term use of these. If these were affected by
the TSMC' earthquake. Wondering if TSMC is equally to blame here. One monopoly is scared of retaliation from another monopoly to state something public.

 

[Ashford]

What a disaster of a release Nvidia....

 

[nnguy2]

Fake frames, fake prices, fake rop.

 

[yRaz]

Questionable the long term use of these. If these were affected by
the TSMC' earthquake. Wondering if TSMC is equally to blame here. One monopoly is scared of retaliation from another monopoly to state something public.

nVidia has openly stated that TSMC sound a defect in Blackwell and then collaborated with them to fix it. I suspect we are seeing the fallout of that. Either some bad chips made it through QA or maybe TSMC and NV didn't fix all of the issues with Blackwell.

I suspect it'll be many months before we get a real answer

 

[poohbear]

What a disaster of a release Nvidia....

I'm wondering if they just don't care about gaming anymore. It's 10% of their revenue, and projected to be much less if their AI revenue keeps going up. Maybe just spin off the Gaming part of their company and focus on AI and data centre GPUs instead?

 

[Eldrach]

I'm wondering if they just don't care about gaming anymore. It's 10% of their revenue, and projected to be much less if their AI revenue keeps going up. Maybe just spin off the Gaming part of their company and focus on AI and data centre GPUs instead?

10% of their revenue - but the best possible PR channel. Consumers are the best way to spread the gospel - which they bring with them to their workplaces. I would reckon there is a huge percentage of global purchase managers that are in some way affected by personal brand opinions.

 

[LimyG]

I find this hard to believe, well that it was deliberate on the part on NV.

I am no NV fan boy, and am unlikely to buy a 5xxx card, certainly in the near term.

But a lot of folks are calling fraud. Not so much on this forum, which speaks well of members. No point jumping to conclusions.

Point is: NV need to get to the bottom of this, be transparent about it, fix it if their fault and all will be forgotten in 6 months or so.

Transparancy is key here.

 

[Tran Bronstein]

This is shaping up to be the worst release NVIDIA has ever done both from a sales and more importantly a PR POV. The latter is going to be very difficult to recover from. Even the most ardent NVIDIA fans and GPU consumers must surely be balking at the idea of burning down their expensive electronics and possibly their homes and getting a defective item that the company knowingly and willfully released.

Everyone assumes that people will buy NVIDIA blindly, but remember that the RTX 4080 sat on shelves and didn't sell well at all, it's successor the more reasonable RTX 4080 Super just barely squeaking by. Consumers have shown that they won't put up with NVIDIA's nonsense if it doesn't make sense economically. Now we're dealing with a far, far worse situation than merely a perceived poor value. We're talking serious class action lawsuit material here. Knowing what we all know now with more info being spread on the Internet by the day, I can't imagine what few RTX 5000 series actually make it to shelves doing anything but just sitting there.

And if people are still dumb enough to buy them knowing all the risks and high costs of taking those risks involved... then just know you're getting what you paid for when things go wrong.