- Nvidia has admitted its RTX 5080 GPU also suffers from a chip-level fault
- It’s the same problem revealed last week that slows down PC gaming for all existing Blackwell GPUs
- Those affected can arrange for a replacement graphics card with the manufacturer of the board
Nvidia has admitted that more of its new Blackwell graphics cards are affected by a fault in their chips that hampers the performance level of the GPU.
Previously, Nvidia said that RTX 5090 (and 5090D, the Asian variant) and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs were potentially hit by the issue whereby the chips have mysteriously lost some ROPs (Raster Operations Pipelines). These are essentially rendering pipelines for 3D graphics, and having fewer of them means performance in PC gaming is slowed down a bit (though the impact is variable).
However, Team Green has now said that RTX 5080 models can also be affected.
Nvidia told The Verge: “Upon further investigation, we’ve identified that an early production build of GeForce RTX 5080 GPUs were also affected by the same issue. Affected consumers can contact the board manufacturer for a replacement.”
This means that all of the new RTX 5000 graphics cards currently available are potentially hit by this problem, although the hardware-level glitch remains rare according to Nvidia. Indeed, Nvidia hasn’t changed its original advisory statement, which states that only 0.5% of Blackwell chips could be affected (around 1 in 200).
Analysis: Give me some ROPs, I’m coming loose…
This revelation comes after scattered reports on Reddit from RTX 5080 owners who’d investigated the ROP count of their graphics card and found it fell short of the official spec. These cards should have 112 ROPs, and as with the other faulty Blackwell GPUs, affected GPUs are missing 8 ROPs.
If you’re worried that your new Blackwell graphics card might be affected, you can check the ROP count using a monitoring utility like GPU-Z (I discuss this further in my original article about the issue).
Customers with an affected graphics card have been promised a replacement, and should contact the manufacturer of their card to organize this swap. Sadly, that’s a bit of a rigmarole to go through, and one that could be made a worse experience given that supply levels and stock are still problematic for Blackwell graphics cards.
For those worried that the incoming RTX 5070 (which is due to land next week) could also be affected, that isn’t the case; Nvidia made this clear after The Verge asked specifically about this model. No other GPUs outside the Blackwell range are affected by the problem either, Team Green clarified.
Nvidia estimates that the typical performance loss an affected card will experience is an average of a 4% slowdown specifically for gaming (with no impact outside of that for tasks like AI or compute workloads). Remember, that’s an average, so for some games, it’ll be more, and for others it’ll be truly negligible (as some games don’t really make much use of the render pipelines in question). Still, it’s not a good look for Nvidia after an already-rocky launch for the Blackwell generation.
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