Nvidia Confirms RTX 5080 Issue As More Cards Found With Missing ROPS
Nvidia has admitted that there's a problem with some of its early RTX 5080 graphics cards. No, it's not the power connectors melting , or the random black screens, or the ridiculous pricing and availability , but missing ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines). In response to cards underperforming, it's confirmed that it's aware of the issue and has suggested that affected RTX 50 owners should contact the board manufacturer (Nvidia or otherwise) to receive a replacement.
But the question then becomes: Is it worth the wait?
Nvidia's RTX 50-series has had a turbulent first few weeks, to say the least. The cards are massively overpriced and impossible to find in stock, and myriad issues plague the scant number of cards that are out there. Alongside driver issues and overheating concerns, some RTX 5090s, 5090Ds, and 5070 Tis were found with missing ROPs, which form a key component in the graphics rendering pipeline. Now Nvidia has confirmed the reports that ROPs are missing from some early batches of RTX 5080 graphics cards, too, with dips in performance in every affected card.
"Upon further investigation, we've identified that an early production build of GeForce RTX 5080 GPUs were also affected by the same issue. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement," Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo told The Verge .
In each incident, it appears that affected cards are missing eight ROPs. In the case of the RTX 5090, that means they have 168 instead of 176, which works out to around a 4% drop in performance. However, for the RTX 5070 Ti, it's 88 instead of 96, a much bigger drop in the percentage of ROPs lost. The RTX 5080 is in the middle, with 104 rather than 112.
This RTX 5080 looks great on the outside, but is it hiding missing hardware under the hood?Credit: Joseph Maldonado
In every instance, however, gamers who spent as much as several thousand dollars are getting graphics cards that perform several percent slower than they should. That, on top of the relatively limited inter-generational performance uplifts (as little as 10% in the case of the 5070 Ti in some games), means that gamers are really missing out if they end up with one of these affected cards.
Nvidia claims around 0.5% of RTX 50-series graphics card buyers were potentially affected. Although that's a small percentage, it could equate to hundreds or even thousands of gamers. Those are also gamers who may have paid artificially hiked scalper prices, or won the retailer lottery in getting through the bots and early-rush-buyers, only to end up with a card that's not even as good as it's supposed to be.
Now they face the prospect of having to send the card off for replacement, with no guarantee of when they'll receive it. No doubt some will want to just take the hit rather than be without their new GPU for weeks or months, but that leaves them without additional frames per second that they arguably paid for.
