You may have just bought an underpowered RTX 5090, here’s what models are affected
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If the RTX 5090 wasn’t already under a lot of scrutiny, it has now been discovered that a ZOTAC RTX 5090 graphics card is being shipped with missing ROPs. A few days ago, user Wuxi Gamer posted on the TechPowerUp forums, reporting that their Zotac RTX 5090 Solid was showing fewer ROPs in GPU-Z than the official specifications. The user tried everything from driver and software reinstalls to switching VBIOSes, but nothing seemed to work.
That's when TechPowerUp decided to recheck their review unit of the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid, confirming their graphics card had the same issue. The Zotac Solid, which should have 176 ROPs (as should any 5090 cards), reportedly only had 168 enabled. Interestingly, during testing of the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid, while they did come across underperformance, they initially thought it had something to do with clock speeds or cooling. Reports so far show deficiencies spotted in the following models:
- Zotac RTX 5090 Solid
- MSI RTX 5090D
- Manli RTX 5090D
Missing ROPs results in a 4.54% performance loss
To see how much of a performance hit those with affected models can expect, TechPowerUp put the card to the test in Elden Ring at 4K UHD with maxed-out settings and native resolution (no DLSS), and the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid falls behind every other RTX 5090 on the list. This puts the Zotac card 5.6% slower than the FE and 8.4% slower than the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC. However, one thing that was pointed out is that the performance hit from the eight missing ROPs depends on how ROP-intensive a game is.
By ROP-intensive, it means games that rely heavily on raster operations for tasks like rendering complex scenes, handling high-resolution textures, and processing large amounts of pixel data. For example, in Starfield, the performance loss is much smaller than what was seen in Elden Ring, and in DOOM Eternal with ray tracing, the card actually ends up close to its expected performance levels.
Watch out – your RTX 5090 might have a defective chip
Now, interestingly, soon after this came to light, many RTX 5090 owners have started paying attention to their graphics card’s ROP count, and the issue is likely possibly to a specific batch of defective chips. We say this because ComputerBase has confirmed that their review unit of the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid featured a full ROP count. However, over on X, user @9550pro has shared that China-exclusive MSI RTX 5090D and the Manli 5090D cards are both measuring just 168 ROPs.
So it doesn’t seem like the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid is the only culprit here, but rather that defective chips may have found their way into certain models. That said, TechPowerUp has confirmed that for them, only the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid showed this issue, while none of the other samples from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and NVIDIA had missing ROPs. We have yet to see board partners address the situation, but for now, if you own an RTX 5090, we’d suggest firing up GPU-Z and checking the ROP count.
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