What just happened? Here's something nobody could have predicted before the RTX 5000 series arrived: a systems integrator has launched a program that ensures the cards it stocks have the correct ROP counts before they're sent to customers. The move comes after Nvidia confirmed a small number of RTX 5090, 5090D, 5080 and 5070 Ti cards have fewer units than they should.
CyberPowerPC hopes to give customers faith that the Blackwell cards in their systems aren't missing any components.
Nvidia has advised anyone who discovers their RTX 5000 card has missing ROPs to contact the board manufacturer that made it. It seems CyberPower doesn't want to be caught up in Nvidia's mess, so it is taking the – admittedly quick and easy – step of checking that the RTX 50xx cards it ships in systems have the correct number of ROPs before they're sent to buyers.
After TechPowerUp spotted the problem in some users' cards, Nvida confirmed there was an issue affecting less than half a percent of RTX 5090, 5090D, and 5070 Ti GPUs, which shipped with at least one ROP missing. The company never went into specifics about what caused the problem in the first place, other than saying it had been addressed.
A few days after Nvidia's admission, a user with an RTX 5080, which the company never mentioned in its announcement as being affected, posted a GPU-Z screenshot showing his card had 104 ROPs instead of the correct 112.
It didn't take long for Nvidia to announce that "upon further investigation," it had found that some RTX 5080 cards were also missing ROPs.
RTX 5090 cards affected by the issue have 168 ROP units instead of 178, while the RTX 5070 Ti has 88 instead of 96. It's estimated that the missing components impact performance by up to five percent, depending on the workload. Some games experience a noticeable FPS decrease, especially Elden Ring, while others, including Starfield and Doom Eternal, experience almost no performance declines.
ROP units play a key role in rasterization by handling final pixel processing, including blending, depth testing, and writing rendered pixels to the framebuffer.
The RTX 5000 series has been one of the worst, if not the worst, graphics card series launches in memory: small generational performance uplifts, melting connectors, non-existent stock levels, missing components, and the (now fixed) black screen issues.
None of this is impacting Nvidia's bottom line, though. In its fourth quarter earnings, the company announced a record full-year revenue of $130.5 billion. It marks a 114% year-over-year increase, all thanks to demand for its AI products. There was hardly any mention of the RTX 5000 series, beyond acknowledging the shortages.
CyberPowerPC is now checking RTX 5000 GPUs for missing ROPs before shipping gaming PCs
