Last week, it was reported that a number of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5000 series graphics cards, consisting of the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090, RTX 5080 and RTX 5070 Ti, were seen to come with an insufficient number of ROP (Rasterization Output Pipeline) units.
TechPowerUp, a technology news website, has reported that their ZOTAC GeForce RTX 5090 Solid graphics card which was supposed to come with 176 ROP units only has 168 ROP units, eight less than what it should have.
The job of these ROP units is to ensure that all the output produced by the GPU section is aligned to become image frames before it is sent to be displayed on the display section.
The loss of these ROP units means that these graphics cards will show a lack of performance, especially lower frame rates because even though the GPU component is able to produce the calculations needed to produce frames, the ROP section is not able to produce the proper number of frame outputs.
This issue of lack of ROP units can be seen on various series of graphics cards, and is not limited to ZOTAC. NVIDIA has also been seen to confirm this, and say that around 0.5 percent of the Blackwell graphics processing chips they produce and send to graphics card developers are facing this issue.
And this issue seems to be the same for all affected graphics cards, where they are 8 ROP units short of what they should be, where it can be said that a group of ROP units are not installed on the GPU component.
The exact number of graphics cards that are showing this issue is unknown, but NVIDIA seems to be aware of this and will ensure that this issue does not occur again. In the meantime, NVIDIA is also investigating the issue of NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5000 graphics cards facing black screen and BSOD issues.