Great news, folks: Nvidia has just confirmed that the production lineup of the fancy new RTX 5000 graphics cards has experienced a hiccup at one point. This manufacturing issue has, in turn, led to a performance reduction on an allegedly small number of cards.
This confirmation comes thanks to TechPowerUp's sleuth-work on the matter, which in turn came about only after RTX 5000 buyers discovered something was amiss. More specifically, a number of RTX 5090 and 5070Ti graphics card users found that their hefty new purchase had a lower number of ROPs (i.e., Raster Operations Pipelines) than advertised. The difference wasn't massive in most cases, but it constituted a roughly 4-5% loss in effective raster performance. And, naturally, when you're paying Nvidia money, you're not going to be happy that you're getting less than was advertised.
If your RTX 5000 GPU isn't actively burning, it might be because it's hobbled, instead.
It's downright befuddling to me just how big of a mess the RTX 5000 is proving to be. Look, I'm no hater, as I'm all for ray-tracing and DLSS and all the other fancy new shindigs Jensen's team of experts comes up with. At the same time, I've got to admit I'm positively thrilled with the fact that I didn't end up selling a kidney to purchase a new GPU that may end up outright burning in my rig. And hey, if it's not trying to kill itself with fire, I suppose the latest is that it might be less performant than it's supposed to be!
TechPowerUp was at the tip of this particular green-shaded spearhead from the get-go, and it didn't take more than a couple of hours before their testing revealed that a non-insignificant number of Nvidia GPUs suffered from reduced ROP count. GPUs from Zotack, MSI, Gigabyte, Palit, and Inno3D were all found to have this problem with a measurable performance impact in rasterized gaming. Nvidia responded quickly enough, but I find it deeply annoying that this problem wasn't announced well ahead of time.
As per Nvidia's global PR director Ben Berraondo's response to The Verge, "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."
Note that Nvidia's reference to "one ROP unit" actually means 8 ROPs in the context of rasterization performance. As per TechPowerUp's findings, a single ROP hardware unit processes eight pixels per clock, which explains the discrepancy in reports from different sources.
The silver lining, then, is that should you find that your RTX 5000 GPU is affected by ROP performance losses, you should be able to request a replacement unit at some point. Regardless, for a company as prolific as Nvidia, the inability to deliver a reliable product is downright staggering.
Let's not forget that the RTX 5000 series is also dropping support for admittedly niche but gosh-darn fun features such as 32-bit PhysX in older titles. I understand and appreciate the performance uplift we're seeing with these new GPUs, but between power draw problems leading to melting power cables, these ROP production issues, and the ridiculous real-world pricing... it just rubs me the wrong way.
The post RTX 5000 series now also has manufacturing issues, continuing Nvidia’s shoddy streak appeared first on Destructoid.
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