Nvidia has had a rockier start to 2025 than one would have imagined thanks to increased focus on competitor AI gains by way of Deepseek, in addition to tariffs placed on China, and more recently, Taiwan shaking up cost structures as well as potential availability for many of its product lines, including its recently released RTX 50 series, the highest-end of which, the RTX 5090 continues to be incredibly short on supply.
And, unfortunately for Nvidia and consumers, this rocky start looks to be continuing with performance issues specifically plaguing RTX 5090/5090D and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs.
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A Somewhat Limited Production Issue In Play
Despite limited supply in play, some of Nvidia’s highest-end RTX 5090s, its China-specific RTX 5090D, and more mid-range RTX 5070 Ti seem to be affected by “production-related” issues as noted by Nvidia itself.
This issue involves certain GPUs being performance-impacted thanks to a lower ROP number than they should have, as indicated by Nvidia in its technical documentation. The affected units suffer from a sub-5% performance drop versus GPUs that do not have said issue based on testing by third parties including TechPowerUp.
Nvidia has already commented on the issue by releasing a statement to The Verge below:
“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.”
For those who received a defective GPU, the ROP numbers should be lower than the advertised 176 for the RTX 5090 (168 being what the impaired models show) and 96 on the RTX 5070 Ti (versus the 88 that impacted units show). Users can use a utility such as GPU-Z or HWiNFO to get specifics such as the number of ROPs on their GPU.
Nvidia’s statement indicates that this is because a certain number of GPUs have one block of ROP less, which essentially means that both the highest-end Blackwell-based GPU and its mid-range sibling are missing exactly eight ROPs in total. It also indicates this is not a relatively widespread issue with 1 in 200 users (of an already limited launch) suffering from performance issues.
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Got A Defective RTX 50 Series GPU? Here’s What You Should Do
With the performance number dip as indicated above not exactly being massive, many users may not be thrilled, having stood in queues or paid through the nose to secure a unit. With the RTX 5090 in particular, essentially being Nvidia’s most expensive consumer-grade GPU to date, tying in with the RTX 3090 Ti when it launched, it might be worth considering reaching out directly to Nvidia (if you have a Founder’s Edition with said issue) or an AIB partner for a fully functional replacement if possible.
Getting a replacement might be trickier, however, given the limited supply in play, especially for the RTX 5090 in particular, given how supply constraints are in play for Nvidia’s fastest consumer-grade GPU to date, with partners such as MSI, Manli, ZOTAC, and Gigabyte known to be some of the brands affected.
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