An owner of the ZOTAC RTX 5090 SOLID card has reported on TechPowerUP forums that his card comes with missing ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines / Render Output Units) compared to what the official specs say. Coincidentally, the website – which also published a review of the card – has found the same issue with their own sample.
RTX 5090 Missing ROPs
A standard NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 card should feature 21,760 CUDA cores, 680 TMUs (texture mapping units), 176 ROPs, 170 RT cores, 680 tensor cores, and 32GB of GDDR7 memory. In this case, both the card owner “Wuxi Gamer” and TechPowerUP reviewers have found their respective units comes with 168 ROPs instead, which is 8 less than advertised (this wasn’t caught on during the review process, despite the apparent loss of performance).
This isn’t just a reporting bug either, as performance tests revealed up to 5% loss in framerates compared to the standard Founders Edition card, despite sharing the same power and clock speed characteristics. That said, performance losses vary from game to game, as this depends on how much ROP utilization is needed for each game, as opposed to shading units (i.e. CUDA cores).
The publication has further confirmed that of all cards they have tested, only the aforementioned ZOTAC card has this issue (while another publication ComputerBase confirmed their unit is working as intended). Identifying the problematic card is relatively simple as well, as the GPU-Z software will report the ROP count to the user – a normal RTX 5090 should report 176 ROPs. However, the exact cause of missing ROPs is unclear, though the card has been returned back to the factory for further investigation.
Pokdepinion: Surely not a silicon defect? That’d get real expensive with the GPU pricing these days.
