GeForce RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs with missing ROPs found, up to 11% slower

NVIDIA's GeForce RTX 50 Series launch has been plagued by issues, from availability to pricing to the return of melting power cables and connectors when trying to game on the new GeForce RTX 5090 flagship. The past few days have seen the RTX 50 Series make headlines for another issue: GPUs being shipped with missing ROPs.

2

GeForce RTX 5080 with fewer ROPs than expected spotted, image credit: Reddit/gingeraffe90

Raster Operators (ROPs) are a key part of the render pipeline and are dedicated bits of hardware that make up the specs of a modern GeForce RTX graphics card. The new flagship GeForce RTX 5090 ($1999) ships with 176 ROPs; however, some early adopters noticed that their cards only reported 168 ROPs - and that performance was not where it should be.

NVIDIA released a statement to confirm that this issue has been corrected and that those affected can contact their board manufacturers for a replacement. According to Team Green, 0.5% or 1 in 200 GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5090 D, and RTX 5070 Ti cards are affected. The company didn't mention the GeForce RTX 5080 in its statement, but over the weekend, Redditor "gingeraffe90" reported that GPU-Z was listing their RTX 5080 as having 104 ROPs instead of 112.

• Read more: NVIDIA shipping gimped GeForce RTX 5090 cards with missing ROPs with 4.5% less performance
• Read more: NVIDIA says only 0.5% of their RTX 5090D, RTX 5070 Ti cards ship with missing ROPs, lower perf

The GeForce RTX 5080 in question has been validated (via Videocardz), so the issue could also affect other RTX 5080 GPUs in circulation. As for the performance hit, NVIDIA notes that the fewer ROPs count would translate to around 4%; however, another report shows that the GeForce RTX 5070 Ti with 88 ROPs instead of 96 ROPs was delivering scores that were up to 11% lower than expected when running the popular 3DMark Time Spy synthetic benchmark.