We finally have some reputable data about the expected performance penalty for Nvidia's defective RTX 50 series GPUs, thanks to Gamers Nexus. The YouTube channel's Steve Burke put up a bounty for Blackwell cards with missing ROPs. Burke offered a $500 bonus on top of the price on the receipt while covering both shipping and taxes. He successfully managed to procure a defective RTX 5080 Founders Edition in exchange for a Zotac equivalent with all its ROPs operational.
Nvidia reported an on-average 4% difference in graphical performance if a GPU had missing ROPs. In the handful of games Burke tested, simple bad luck could land you up-to 11% behind other RTX 5080 users, as shown in Total War: Warhammer 3 at 4K. Moving over to the 1440p results, the gap closes somewhat as most games are within 3-4%, with a maximum variation of 8.8% in Dying Light 2 Stay Human. The data indicates that higher resolutions are generally more taxing on the ROP units.
When compared against other GPUs in the same ballpark, in the worst-case scenario, the defective RTX 5080 falls to RTX 5070 Ti levels, which invalidates the $250 price gap between the two. Of course, these results are game-dependent, so these outcomes aren't universal.
The best resolution from Nvidia is to create a driver-level identifier to alarm users if their RTX 50 GPU is missing ROP units. This is because the average consumer likely doesn't use third-party hardware monitoring utilities like GPU-Z and HWiNFO. Even if partners are offering replacements and refunds, supply constraints could keep you waiting for days, if not weeks for a new graphics card.
On the bright side, faulty RTX 5080s, before PCB assembly, could be repurposed by Nvidia (through software) as RTX 5070 Tis, in the future. A BIOS reflash could potentially restore these special units to RTX 5080 specs, unless Nvidia scraps these dies.
