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Nvidia plays a surprise Uno Reverse card as the missing ROPs debacle rolls on in a new way. This time, a graphics card has been discovered with too many, instead of not enough.
A number of questions have been raised about the state of Nvidia’s Quality Assurance processes in light of the reports of missing Raster Operations Pipeline units in some of its most expensive graphics cards, leading to worse performance. Though questions have taken an entirely new dimension with the discovery of an Nvidia GPU containing too many ROPs.
RTX 5090 found with more ROPs than expected
Respected tech publication and reviewer TechPowerUp has uncovered an ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 LC graphics card that has 16 more ROPs than it should. This comes after the publication was one of the first to break the news of missing ROPs in one of its Zotac 5090 cards. The RTX 5090 is supposed to have 176 ROPs, but the card TechPowerUp acquired has a whopping 192. This is the full complement of ROPs available for the GB202 silicon.
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The ASUS ROG Astral GeForce RTX 5090 LC is a factory overclocked card and has some other configuration differences to set it apart from the RTX 5090 Founders Edition. TechPowerUp made an effort to clock it back down to equivalent specs to the RTX 5090 FE, but even then, benchmarking tests showed that the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 has an average of 8% better performance versus the Founders Edition.
Did the RTX 5090 get RTX PRO 6000 silicon?
As to why this model of the RTX 5090 ended up with a higher than expected ROP count, TechPowerUp has put forward a theory. Nvidia recently launched the RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell. These cards are designed for professional enterprise use for applications such as 3d visualisation, data mapping, and other demanding use cases. This professional graphics card maxes out the GB202 chip, enabling all 192 ROPs and 188 SMs in order to bring the shader count right up to 24,064.
With this in mind, a possible scenario is that Nvidia made an error when fusing the silicon for the RTX 5090 and RTX PRO 6000, resulting in some GPUs getting too much, while others didn’t get enough.
If you want to check the ROP count on your RTX 50 series, then you can refer to our guide.
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