You’ll have simply purchased an underpowered RTX 5090, right here’s what fashions are affected

If the RTX 5090 wasn’t already beneath a number of scrutiny, it has now been found {that a} ZOTAC RTX 5090 graphics card is being shipped with lacking ROPs. A couple of days in the past, person Wuxi Gamer posted on the TechPowerUp boards, reporting that their Zotac RTX 5090 Stable was displaying fewer ROPs in GPU-Z than the official specs. The person tried all the pieces from driver and software program reinstalls to switching VBIOSes, however nothing appeared to work.

That is when TechPowerUp determined to recheck their overview unit of the Zotac RTX 5090 Stable, confirming their graphics card had the identical situation. The Zotac Stable, which ought to have 176 ROPs (as ought to any 5090 playing cards), reportedly solely had 168 enabled. Apparently, throughout testing of the Zotac RTX 5090 Stable, whereas they did come throughout underperformance, they initially thought it had one thing to do with clock speeds or cooling. Stories thus far present deficiencies noticed within the following fashions:

• Zotac RTX 5090 Stable
• MSI RTX 5090D
• Manli RTX 5090D

Lacking ROPs leads to a 4.54% efficiency loss

To see how a lot of a efficiency hit these with affected fashions can anticipate, TechPowerUp put the cardboard to the take a look at in Elden Ring at 4K UHD with maxed-out settings and native decision (no DLSS), and the Zotac RTX 5090 Stable falls behind each different RTX 5090 on the listing. This places the Zotac card 5.6% slower than the FE and eight.4% slower than the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC. Nonetheless, one factor that was identified is that the efficiency hit from the eight lacking ROPs is determined by how ROP-intensive a recreation is.

By ROP-intensive, it means video games that rely closely on raster operations for duties like rendering complicated scenes, dealing with high-resolution textures, and processing massive quantities of pixel information. For instance, in Starfield, the efficiency loss is far smaller than what was seen in Elden Ring, and in DOOM Everlasting with ray tracing, the cardboard truly finally ends up near its anticipated efficiency ranges.

Be careful – your RTX 5090 may need a faulty chip

Now, curiously, quickly after this got here to mild, many RTX 5090 house owners have began being attentive to their graphics card’s ROP depend, and the problem is probably going presumably to a particular batch of faulty chips. We are saying this as a result of ComputerBase has confirmed that their overview unit of the Zotac RTX 5090 Stable featured a full ROP depend. Nonetheless, over on X, person @9550pro has shared that China-exclusive MSI RTX 5090D and the Manli 5090D playing cards are each measuring simply 168 ROPs.

So it doesn’t look like the Zotac RTX 5090 Stable is the one offender right here, however reasonably that faulty chips might have discovered their manner into sure fashions. That mentioned, TechPowerUp has confirmed that for them, solely the Zotac RTX 5090 Stable confirmed this situation, whereas not one of the different samples from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and NVIDIA had lacking ROPs. We now have but to see board companions deal with the state of affairs, however for now, when you personal an RTX 5090, we’d counsel firing up GPU-Z and checking the ROP depend.