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The Nvidia RTX 50-series has been hobbled by all kinds of problems, least of which being low stocks and resultant high prices. So when there was talk of missing ROPs in some of the new GPUs, it seemed like little more than nasty icing on an under-baked cake. However, if what founder and CEO of Maingear Computer’s Wallace Santos says is anything to go by, this problem might be incredibly rare.
“We thoroughly test every MAINGEAR Computers before it ships—including installing GPU-Z, checking for anomalies like missing ROPs,” the CEO says in a LinkedIn post. “Out of the hundreds of 5000 series builds, we’ve found 0 GPUs with missing ROPs. Our mission is simple… build it well and support it well so you can game!”
This seems to corroborate Nvidia saying that only 0.5% of all cards are affected. The company told The Verge that it’s a “rare issue affecting less than 0.5% of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs which have one fewer ROP than specified” and “the average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads.” These missing ROPs were apparently due to a “production anomaly”.
The company also stated that “upon further investigation, we’ve identified that an early production build of GeForce RTX 5080 GPUs were also affected by the same issue.”
For those wondering, an ROP is a ‘raster operations pipeline’ or ‘render output pipeline’, which is a chunk of hardware in the GPU that deals with the final steps in the rendering process, including the production of actual pixels to store in the frame buffer for display on-screen.
Some RTX 50-series users (including TechPowerUp with one of the graphics cards it tested) noticed that their graphics cards had eight fewer ROPs than they should have, leading to worse performance than they should have.
It’s easy enough to check whether this affects your card, as hardware reporting software such as TechPowerUp GPU-Z will tell you the number of ROPs/TMUs in your GPU.
It’s not a great look to have your GPUs that are already in short supply and frequently selling for well above MSRP turn out to be less powerful than advertised due to a “production anomaly”. But this info from Maingear does seem to corroborate the idea that the issue is very rare—perhaps just a problem with an “early production build”, as Nvidia claimed.
If only we could say the same about the black screen issues. At least that problem has a driver fix rolling out sometime this week. Until then, check your ROP counts and keep your eyes peeled for those driver updates, I suppose.
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Kurt Indovina
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