People are a little hesitant to pick up an RTX 50 card, and honestly, I don't blame them. The release has been a little bit of a mess, with some cards suffering black screen issues right out of the gate (which Nvidia hopefully fixed in its newest driver update). However, there are some issues you can't fix with an update, such as some cards shipping without a proper ROP count. This led to performance drops of up to 5%, which may not sound like a lot, but if someone's dropping $2,000 on a GPU, you bet they want every last drop of performance from it.

Fortunately, the incidence rate is pretty low; Nvidia claims that 0.5% of the boards manufactured have a lower-than-usual ROP count. However, there's always a chance you won't be a part of the lucky 99.5%, especially at that price. In response, some PC builders are giving a "ROP guarantee" where they've insured that the cards they sell have no physical defects.

Sellers are now testing GTX 50 cards for correct ROP counts

As spotted by VideoCardz, CyberPowerPC has begun ensuring its shoppers that any RTX 50 series cards that they purchase will undergo testing before they're shipped out. If you try to purchase a PC with an RTX 50 card, the website will show the following message:

CyberPowerPC will ensure all systems equipped with GeForce RTX 5090, 5080, and 5070 Ti video cards have the correct number of ROPs before shipping.

Fortunately, this shouldn't take CyberPowerPC too long to do with every computer they ship out. If it's doing a base-level of testing to begin with, all they need to do is fire up an app like GPU-Z and look at the ROPs count. If it's lower than usual, it's a bad GPU—it's a check that the company could do in about a minute tops.

It's a little saddening that retailers have to perform these checks before sending out hardware. Ideally, they should be confident enough to send out the card without having to always check the ROP count. However, we're entering a new GPU era where things aren't quite as they were before, and there's a good chance it'll change once more. In fact, you could argue that we're to blame for all the things wrong with the RTX 50 series.