Update | Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: Performance woes rear their head on some early Zotac Solid graphics cards

Nvidia and its board partners have now started shipping early GeForce RTX 50 series graphics cards, albeit only in desktop form for the time being. While the supply of GeForce RTX 5090 is set to improve 'in the coming weeks', it seems that some units are shipping with fewer Raster Operating Units (ROPs) than advertised.

For context, Nvidia GPUs use ROPs to process anti-aliasing and colour compression, among other critical tasks. In other words, having fewer ROPs than expected should impact performance, which is what TechPowerUp and a forum member called Wuxi Gamer have experienced with the Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid.

Reportedly, some units have shipped with 168 ROPs, 8 ROPs fewer than a GeForce RTX 5090 should have. ComputerBase stresses that its Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid does not suffer from this issue. Nonetheless, there is no way to determine which units are affected without powering them on. The 4.5% ROP reduction results in disproportionate performance degradation, too.

According to TechPowerUp, its Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid fared about 5.6% worse than a GeForce RTX 5090 Founders Edition in Elden Ring at 4K even after retesting. This performance drop still puts affected RTX 5090 cards ahead of all Nvidia's other releases though, including the GeForce RTX 5080 (curr. $2,399.99 on Amazon). Unfortunately, the exact cause of the issue is unknown for the time being and whether it is hardware or software-related. Some quarters report that the issue could stem from defective GB202 GPUs; this has not been confirmed yet.