After Nvidia officially admitted that a small batch of RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs were plagued by a production issue causing missing ROPs, reports emerged online that the RTX 5080 also suffers from the same issue. Nvidia has now confirmed that some RTX 5080 cards also have 8 fewer ROPs, resulting in 104 total units instead of 112.
According to a statement issued by Nvidia to The Verge, the company seems to have found out that “an early production build of the RTX 5080 GPUs were also affected by the same issue”. Nvidia has, once again, asked customers to “contact the board manufacturer for a replacement”. As pointed out by VideoCardz, Nvidia appears to leave the investigation of the issue to the customers. While this is fine for tech-savvy gamers who can use tools like GPU-Z, we can presume a majority of users will remain unaware of the issue.
So, unsuspecting gamers are in for a measurable performance loss as shown by recent testing.
Nvidia’s handling of the latest RTX 50 debacle is strange
Nvidia curiously claims that only around 0.5% of the RTX 5090/D, RTX 5080, and RTX 5070 Ti are missing ROPs. There are several questions raised by the media. For starters, how did Nvidia figure out so early that only around 0.5% of the RTX 5080 were affected soon after reports popped online? Could it be possible that Nvidia knew about the issue beforehand but did not deem it serious enough?
Then, there is the problem of the 4% gaming performance degradation claimed by Team Green. As we reported yesterday, the RTX 5070 Ti with 8 fewer ROPs showed anywhere from a single digit up to an 11% performance loss in 3DMark benchmarks. So, the final impact seems to be different in different scenarios which makes sense.
Therefore, Nvidia claiming an average of 4% is unconfirmable until we get some in-depth testing done by independent testers. Till then, take any and all information shared online with caution.
Source(s)
The Verge, VideoCardz, Teaser image: Vaidyanathan Subramaniam for Notebookcheck, Pixabay, edited