If you've been out of the loop, a handful of RTX 50-series (Blackwell)GPUs are reported to suffer from a manufacturing flaw that fuses off an ROP partition in the GPU. Nvidia quickly addressed these reports and claimed that only the RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and RTX 5070 Ti are affected; however, a new Reddit user report indicates that the RTX 5080 is also implicated. Courtesy of Hardwareluxx, the user tested their unit in 3DMark Time Spy, where it suffered a 12% performance loss, enough to put it behind the RTX 4080 Super in some scenarios.
As the news spread, Nvidia followed up with a statement asserting that only 0.5% of units manufactured are affected, with an on-average 4% loss in graphical performance. The defect is consistent across all impacted GPUs, disabling only one ROP partition (eight ROPs). Such manufacturing flaws typically occur when manufacturers fuse off individual components from a full-fat die for binning. For example, GB202 carries 192 SMs; however, the RTX 5090 uses a partially enabled variant with 170 enabled SMs.
The RTX 5080 was considered a fully enabled GB203 chip; however, hardware sleuth MEGAsizeGPU claims that Nvidia disabled one set of media engines on the GPU. Fusing off any part of the chip carries a risk of disabling neighboring components, and this theory may clarify why the RTX 5080 is also seemingly affected. Still, this doesn't explain how or why Nvidia and AIBs let these chips pass QA testing.
In 3DMark Time Spy, a normal RTX 5080 with all 112 ROPs operational scored 32,273 points, while the nerfed unit with 104 ROPs scored 28,118 points, roughly 12% slower. We've gathered that 3DMark Time Spy is extremely sensitive to ROP counts, and the performance hit varies from scenario to scenario. The user's setup features a Core i7-12700K and 32GB of DDR4-3200 memory.
Nvidia has asked affected customers to contact their respective board partners for a replacement, though given the ongoing shortages, there's no guarantee of when they'll receive one given the ongoing shortages.
Blackwell has been quite disappointing with non-existent inventory, inflated prices, manufacturing defects, and the return of the cable meltdown scare. Let's hope RDNA 4 is priced well enough to provide competitive offerings, at least in the budget market.
