this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
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204
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 Spotted with Missing ROPs, Performance Loss Confirmed, Multiple Vendors Affected (techpowerup.com)
submitted 1 day ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Seems like so far, as far as anybody knows, only the Zotac "Solid" cards are affected.

First paragraph reads:

TechPowerUp has discovered that there are NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards in retail circulation that come with too few render units, which lowers performance. Zotac's GeForce RTX 5090 Solid comes with fewer ROPs than it should—168 are enabled, instead of the 176 that are part of the RTX 5090 specifications. This loss of 8 ROPs has a small, but noticeable impact on performance. During recent testing, we noticed our Zotac RTX 5090 Solid sample underperformed slightly, falling behind even the NVIDIA RTX 5090 Founders Edition card. At the time we didn't pay attention to the ROP count that TechPowerUp GPU-Z was reporting, and instead spent time looking for other reasons, like clocks, power, cooling, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Basically, the ROPs are in charge of the final stage of rendering a frame.

They are discrete, physical components of the GPU.

GPUs at this point are quite complex boards of many specialized kinds of processors passing information to and from each other.

Tensor cores, RT cores, CUDA cores, ROPs, etc... these are all specialized processors, specializing in different kinds of computations.

ROPs, Raster Output Processors, do varying kinds of postprocessing on the almost final stage of a rendered frame, assemble the data from other parts of the GPU and then push the finalized, rastered pixels to the frame buffer.

A rough analogy would that ROPs are in charge of the final editing pass on a paper or article before it's published, with the analagous 'research', 'fact verifying', and 'rough draft' having already been done by other parts of the GPU first.

Maybe another analogy would be that ROPs are the 'final assembly' of a frame, if constructing a frame was like building a car or aircraft.

A simpler, more literal explanation is that the ROPs perform the final stage of rendering a frame before the GPU actually pushes it out for you to see.

So... if the GPU is missing 8 ROPs... the GPU is basically bottlenecking itself, internally.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 day ago

Wow thank you for the explanation! That made it very clear.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago

Thank you for the explanation!