With the ROP fiasco ongoing for NVIDIA’s entire RTX 50 series lineup thus far, Gamers Nexus has obtained one such defective unit in the form of RTX 5080 with 8 missing ROPs (104 of 112) through a viewer, of which he offered a $500 bounty on top of the price it was originally purchased. Testing showed the deficient card exhibited performance loss in some games, by up to 11%.
Defective RTX 5080 Tested
Context: a user originally discovered their ZOTAC RTX 5090 comes with 8 less ROPs than advertised, and soon after publication TechPowerUp also found the same flaw in their very own card after the review was published. The reported ROP count can be found through the GPU-Z software, which has since been updated to only report live ROP counts when the drivers are installed, to avoid any potential false negatives.
Then, the RTX 5090 D (China’s version of RTX 5090 with restricted AI capabilities) and RTX 5070 Ti joins the list of known models with missing ROPs, of which NVIDIA officially acknowledged that less than 0.5% of such units are in circulation, each claimed to exhibit 4% loss in graphics performance on average. Shortly after, the RTX 5080 also was spotted with the exact same flaw, and that brings us right here.
Gamers Nexus took the defective card and tested it against a healthy RTX 5080, which shows that performance hit can vary from game-to-game. In the best-case scenario, Black Myth: Wukong exhibited no performance loss despite losing 8 ROP units, whereas worst-case scenario saw Total War: Warhammer 3 lose 11% performance in 4K, just from the missing ROPs alone. Generally, however, the deficits hover between 2-5%, and the effect shrinks as the resolution goes down.
NVIDIA officially advises anyone who owns a defective GPU with missing ROPs to contact their board partner for replacement unit, as this is believed to be a hardware flaw originated from a production error, which can’t be fixed after the fact once they are released in the market.
Pokdepinion: This launch has been quite disastrous going by Team Green’s recent track record.
