It’s always annoying when your hardware fails, but it’s even more annoying when your extremely scarce hardware fails. This is exactly what’s happening to some NVIDIA RTX 5090 buyers, sadly.

Reports are surfacing of a potential hardware defect affecting NVIDIA’s newly launched flagship GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs. The issue itself is rumored to be linked to the “Blackwell” GB202 chip, and it results in a reduced number of Render Output Units (ROPs), which leads to very significant performance degradation. The problem first came to light with reports of RTX 5090 cards showing fewer ROPs than expected in the GPU-Z monitoring software.

Initially, it was thought that it could be a bug—after all, NVIDIA did make some pretty tall promises when it launched the card, so it could have just been that the hardware is falling short of those promises. However, further investigation, including testing with HWINFO, confirmed the ROP reduction, indicating a more serious underlying problem. A reduced number of ROPs can limit a GPU’s ability to render final images, impacting performance. The source of the issue, according to reports, points to defects within the GB202 chip itself, the core of the RTX 5090. The problem seems limited to a small number of units at this early stage, but it’s also not restricted to a specific manufacturer, so we could have this on cards from basically all third-party manufacturers as well as NVIDIA’s own Founders Edition.

It is still unknown if the problem extends to other models like the RTX 5080. It’s also not clear right now if NVIDIA will be offering RMA replacements or refunds for affected units—or even worse, if it’s too widespread, it might end up having to do a recall. If you managed to spend a lot of money on an RTX 5090, you might want to check whether it’s performing as it should or not. If it seems slower than reviews online show it to be, you might need to replace yours.

Source: Wccftech