If you’re one of the lucky and well-stacked fellas who owned the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 or the recently launched RTX 5070 Ti, you better off go and run GPU-Z to find out if you’re one of the unlucky ones with the “defective brains”.
According to one statement issued by an official NVIDIA representative to Tom’s Hardware, it says that “We have identified a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half a percent) of GeForce RTX 5090 / 5090D and 5070 Ti GPUs, which have one fewer ROP than specified. The average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workloads. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.”.
From the info, Team Green seems to admit that they “acknowledged” the problem beforehand but are still committed to letting the defective GB202 and GB203 GPU dies be soldered onto PCBs for retail. As such, one may experience lower-than-expected performance.
As for the mass public that got these GPUs via AIB partners like MSI, ASUS, etc., you’ll have to get in contact with the brand’s representative such as distributors or at the very least, from the DIY PC shop or “that guy” who sold you the card, in order to get a replacement.
Despite the ongoing stock shortage amongst the recurring melting power cables/connectors and the latest “blown capacitor” incidents, this ROP issue isn’t going to play well for the Blackwell series in the long run. Since last year, the industrial segment has seen shipment of Blackwell AI server hardware being delayed due to design flaws leading to overheating even with some of the best cooling hardware available.
