NVIDIA has just confirmed that some of the RTX5090, RTX5090D and even some RTX5070Ti graphics chips it ships are missing rendering units, and if your graphics card is affected, you can get a replacement.
Ben Berraondo, NVIDIA GeForce global public relations director, said:
We have discovered a rare issue affecting less than 0.5% (half) of GeForce RTX 5090/5090D and 5070Ti GPUs that have one less ROP than specified. The average impact on graphics performance is 4%, with no impact on artificial intelligence and computing workloads. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for replacement. The production anomaly has been corrected.
Overall, the number of affected GPUs isn't huge, especially since there aren't many 5090 cards on the shelves to begin with, and the impact on performance isn't huge - as those who have discovered missing rendering units have already attested. But that's just the latest in a long line of problems with NVIDIA's latest high-priced graphics cards, which include boot driver issues (including some persistent black screen issues NVIDIA is still investigating) and some blown power connectors.
The manufacturing issue, while limited, affects multiple NVIDIA graphics card partners: Zotac, MSI, Gigabyte, Manli, and even reports of NVIDIA Foundations Edition graphics cards showing ROP loss. You can check your graphics card using GPU-Z to see if it's showing the appropriate number of 176 ROPs; if it's less, you probably should replace your graphics card.