Nvidia has introduced its new GeForce RTX 5090 graphics card, which boasts prices starting at $1,999. However, a recent report by TechPowerUp has revealed that the ‘Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid’ model is experiencing performance issues due to an anomaly in the number of Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs).
According to TechPowerUp’s investigation, the affected cards display only 168 ROPs, compared to the expected 176, and have been found to result in a 4.54% dip in raster rendering capabilities compared to other vendors’ cards and even Nvidia’s own Founders Edition card.
The discrepancy affects Zotac and MSI RTX 5090D models. TechPowerUp has conducted benchmarks using Elden Ring at 4K resolution with max settings without DLSS, showing the performance hit caused by the lower ROPs.
A GPU-Z scan can help identify this issue in affected cards. Nvidia may resolve this problem through a driver or BIOS update if the ROPs aren’t disabled at a hardware level.
Source: https://www.neowin.net/news/some-nvidia-rtx-5090s-may-be-defective-shipping-with-lower-rops-and-hobbling-performance