Some RTX 5090 GPUs are missing out on a bit of performance

By Monica J. White Published February 21, 2025

As if the launch of Nvidia’s RTX 50-series wasn’t bumpy enough, it now turns out that some of these GPUs are missing out on a bit of performance, and it’s unclear how many cards are affected. Although they still are the best graphics cards right now, some RTX 5090s may not have their full specs, and it’s affecting their performance.

This was discovered by TechPowerUp, and the affected GPU is a Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 solid, but apparently, cards from other manufacturers might also be affected. Let’s dig into what exactly is going on.

During the testing process, TechPowerUp noticed that their Zotac RTX 5090 was underperforming when compared to other models of the card. The publication also tested Nvidia’s Founders Edition, so it had a certain expectation that the Zotac model was failing to meet. Nvidia’s FE is usually treated as a baseline, and partner cards should not offer less performance — most will squeeze out a little bit more, especially if overclocked.

The lower performance wasn’t a major difference; it amounted to about five percent. Still, that’s a lot when you’re comparing two RTX 5090s to each other. Although TechPowerUp tried to trace what caused this, the truth only came out when one of its readers posted a forum thread reporting that their Zotac RTX 5090 Solid had fewer ROPs (raster operations pipeline units) than advertised. According to the official specs, the RTX 5090 should come with 176 ROPs, but this model only had 168 ROPs enabled, as per the GPU-Z test.

The affected user tried all the fixes you could think of, including a fresh driver install and even a different BIOS. Unfortunately, that didn’t bring those missing ROPs back.

Digging deeper, TechPowerUp discovered that their Zotac GPU also had fewer ROPs than it was supposed to. Eight were missing.  The publication then re-tested the card and found that the Zotac RTX 5090 was underperforming when compared to every other model of the card; the GPU was 5.6% slower than Nvidia’s Founders Edition, and a whopping 8.4% slower than the overclocked version of the Asus ROG Astral RTX 5090.

MSI 5090D😅 https://t.co/Ij48LQ98hD pic.twitter.com/EfHgPcMi2k

— HXL (@9550pro) February 21, 2025

This could’ve been a Zotac-specific problem, but Zotac itself couldn’t have configured the number of ROPs on the silicon. However, this should’ve been caught during the quality assurance stage at either Nvidia or Zotac. The company is yet to comment on the issue, but it turns out that it might not be alone in this. According to a screenshot posted by HXL on X (Twitter), one MSI RTX 5090D (which is a China-specific model of the GPU) also shows up with fewer ROPs than it should.

It’s hard to know what caused this problem or what possible fixes there might be, but it’s sad to see the RTX 50-series being plagued with issues from the get-go, including low availability and inflated pricing.