With melting power cables and practically fictional stock levels, the Nvidia GeForce RTX 5000 launch has already come in for some criticism, but now Nvidia has admitted that there’s another problem. After recent reports that some RTX 5090 and 5070 Ti GPUs didn’t have the correct number of render outputs (ROPs), the GPU maker has now confirmed that this is also the case with some Nvidia GeForce RTX 5080 cards too, and it can result in a 4% drop in gaming performance.
The first reports of missing RTX 5080 ROPs appeared on Reddit on February 23, prompting Nvidia to update its previous statement about the GPUs affected by the issue. As we found in our RTX 5080 review, this new Nvidia GPU is a decent performer for the money, especially given the current lack of competition in this price sector, but apparently not all 5080 cards are equal, and it’s up to you to spot it.
In a statement given to tech site TechPowerUp, Nvidia admitted, “Upon further investigation, we’ve identified that an early production build of GeForce RTX 5080 GPUs were also affected by the same issue [as the 5090 and 5070 Ti]. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement.”
In its earlier statement given to The Verge, Nvidia claimed the issue affects less than 0.5% of GPUs and that “the average graphical performance impact is 4%, with no impact on AI and Compute workload.” However, the performance largely depends on the game in question.
ROP either stands for render output or raster operation pipeline, depending on who you ask, and it’s the ROPs that sit in the last stages of the graphics pipeline, once all the shading work has been done, handing the final pixel data to your graphics card’s VRAM, as well as handling pixel processing work such as anti-aliasing.
Handily, TechPowerUp also happened to have a Zotac RTX 5090 Solid card affected by the issue in the labs, and has run some tests in comparison to an unaffected RTX 5090 Founders Edition card. There’s not much difference in games such as Doom Eternal and Starfield, but the 3DMark Time Spy Extreme Graphics score drops from 25,439 to 22,621 – an 11% drop. In Elden Ring with max settings and no DLSS at 4K, the Zotac card is also 5.6% slower than the Founders Edition card.
Specifically, the issue seems to be that one ROP unit (containing eight ROPs) is disabled on the affected GPUs. If you want to see if your GPU is affected, your best bet is to download the latest version of GPU-Z, and check the number of ROPs. If you have an RTX 5090, the number should be 176 – if it’s 168 then you need to contact your card manufacturer to get a replacement. Likewise, the ROPs in the RTX 5080 specs should be 112 – if your card only has 104 in GPU-Z then you need to get your card replaced.
In many ways, Nvidia is lucky that it currently has no threat from competition in the high-end GPU market at the moment. The company might be able to claim it has the best graphics card now, but RTX 5090 stock is extremely thin on the ground and these quality-control issues are very far from ideal.
If you’re looking to buy an RTX 5080 for yourself, we can at least help you to find one. Check out our where to buy 5080 page to see which retailers in your region currently have stock of any cards.
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