Fri Feb 28 04:30:00 UTC 2025: **Nvidia’s RTX 50-Series GPUs Hit by Manufacturing Defect Affecting Performance**
**[City, State] – [Date]** – Nvidia is addressing a manufacturing defect affecting a small percentage of its newly released RTX 50-series graphics cards. Users have reported a significant performance drop, up to 10 percent in some cases, due to missing Render Output Units (ROPs). This impacts the final frame rate in games, though AI and compute workloads remain unaffected.
Nvidia acknowledges the issue, stating it affects approximately 0.5 percent of the manufactured GPUs, resulting from a quality assurance problem that has since been rectified. The company assures consumers that the average performance impact is only 4 percent.
Affected owners of RTX 5090 and RTX 5070 Ti cards will experience fewer ROPs than advertised (168 instead of 176 on the 5090, and 88 instead of 96 on the 5070 Ti). Nvidia recommends that customers contact their respective manufacturers (Nvidia directly for Founder’s Edition cards or vendors like Asus, MSI, and Gigabyte) to initiate a return merchandise authorization (RMA) process under warranty.
While Nvidia describes the issue as “rare,” the high cost of these GPUs (over $1000) and the noticeable performance degradation make the problem significant for affected users. This is not the only quality control issue reported with the new RTX 50-series, with some users also experiencing melting power cables, a problem that also plagued the previous RTX 40-series. Despite these issues, the overall likelihood of receiving a defective card remains low.
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