News ZOTAC is shipping GeForce RTX 5090 with missing ROPs, up to 4.5% lower performance

Kaching999

Kaching999

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Zotac is at it again with their abhorrent QC. Member of the TechPowerUP forums has discovered that a ZOTAC RTX 5090 graphics card has missing ROPs (Raster Operating Units or Raster Operating Pipelines). The ZOTAC SOLID card, which should have 176 ROPs, is reportedly shipping with only 168 ROPs enabled.

In the original review, TechPowerUP noticed that the ZOTAC 5090 SOLID card underperformed slightly and was falling behind the RTX 5090 Founders Edition. They admitted they didn’t initially notice that their card had the same issue, and only after a discovery by TechPowerUP forum member “Wuxi Gamer” did they confirm that their card had the same problem with missing ROPs.

In the first test, “Elden Ring” at 4K UHD with maxed-out settings and native resolution (no DLSS), the Zotac RTX 5090 Solid falls behind every other RTX 5090 tested, including the NVIDIA Founders Edition, which serves as a reference design establishing a performance baseline for the RTX 5090. The Zotac card is 5.6% slower than the Founders Edition and 8.4% slower than the ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 OC, the fastest custom design card for this test. Officially, the Solid is clocked at a 2407 MHz rated boost frequency, matching the Founders Edition clocks—it shouldn’t be significantly slower in real-life scenarios. The interesting thing is that the loss of performance is not visible when monitoring the clock frequencies, as they are as high as expected—there are just fewer units available to handle the rendering workload.
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TechPowerUP has confirmed that only the ZOTAC SOLID RTX 5090 has been seen with this error; none of the other samples, including those from ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Palit, and NVIDIA, have shown the same problem. Perhaps this is just a simple BIOS mishap, or perhaps it only affects initial cards, but the damage has already been done. Even if this is fixable with a new BIOS, it will still require a BIOS update on a $1999+ graphics card, good luck with that.

ZOTAC has not issued a statement on the issue, but TechPowerUP will work with ZOTAC and NVIDIA to send the card back and find a solution. It is very likely that these ROPs can be re-enabled, but if it is not possible, then there is a major problem.

Computerbase has confirmed that their unit has no such issues.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1892898298106618186

Source: TECHPOWERUP VIDEOCARDZ
 
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