Despite all the hype surrounding the RTX 5090, things haven't been panning out well for Nvidia. First, the company suffered huge shortages of cards, to the point where scalpers were trying to flip them for $9,000. Then, people were experiencing black screen issues after updating their drivers. Now, it seems some GPUs are physically defective, as they're reporting fewer ROPs than usual.

Some Nvidia RTX 5090 batches are suffering from hardware issues

As reported by Wccftech, some 5090 owners were getting confusing reports when looking at the specs through GPU-Z. The 5090 is supposed to have 176 Render Output Units (ROPs), but some people saw that GPU-Z reported that they only had 168. While some people speculated that this may have been a bug with GPU-Z itself, it turns out that those ROPs were physically not there on the board, which resulted in performance loss.

The problem lies within the 5090's GB202 chip, and Wccftech notes that potentially all variants of the 5090 can fall victim to this nasty issue. The best way to find out if it affects your own card is to take a look at the ROPs count in GPU-Z; if it's anything less than 176, you have a bad card.

Fortunately, there's a good chance that Nvidia will let people send in bad GPUs under RMA, so owners shouldn't need to rebuy the $2,000 card. However, if the problem ends up being pretty widespread, it could spell bad news for Nvidia, especially given how AMD is about to unload its own servo of cards in the near future.