As Nvidia confirmed yesterday, a handful of RTX 50 GPUs have been affected by a manufacturing defect resulting in fewer ROPs than specified. The impacted GPUs, per Nvidia, include the RTX 5090 and the RTX 5070 Ti; the RTX 5080 is seemingly unaffected, with no reports having emerged yet. Meanwhile, a user at ComputerBase forums discovered that their RTX 5070 Ti was affected and offered several performance benchmarks for analysis.
The out-of-spec RTX 50 series GPUs news broke when a user at TechPowerUp's forums reported a missing ROP partition (eight ROPs) on their RTX 5090. All attempts through software such as driver reinstalls, and switching vBIOS versions, were in vain. As the news spread, more users started to double-check their units, kicking in the domino effect. Eventually, Nvidia confirmed that this "rare" issue resides at the hardware level and only impacts 0.5% of GPUs produced; claimed to decrease performance by 4%.
It's unclear how Nvidia greenlit defective GB202 and GB203 chips, which are also subject to testing by AIB partners. In any case, a user with the alias "Der Zeitgeist" reported their MSI RTX 5070 Ti Gaming Trio had defective silicon, containing 88 ROPs instead of the specified 96, as confirmed by the Nvidia white paper. The user provided several benchmarks of their "nerfed" unit, and the performance gap can be as high as 12% in some scenarios.
In 3DMark Time Spy, the cut-down RTX 5070 Ti accumulated 24,755 points, 10% lower than ComputerBase's MSI Ventus OC variant with all 96 ROPs present. In other benchmarks that aren't exactly ROP-intensive, the difference is minimal but still noticeable.
What's intriguing is that the RTX 5080 remains unaffected, built using the same GB203 chip as the RTX 5070 Ti. This hardware defect may explain Nvidia's decision to push the budget RTX 5070 back to early March. Affected customers have been asked to contact their respective board partners for a replacement, which might take a while given the ongoing Blackwell shortages.
Melting concerns, PCIe stability issues, lack of supply, and now defective silicon have plagued the RTX 50 family launch. The silver lining is that the supply aspect of these problems is rumored to improve starting next month, coincidentally aligning with AMD's RDNA 4 launch.
