GPU shader cores — called CUDA cores in Nvidia parlance — and ROPs are important aspects of modern GPUs. With it's upcomig RTX 50-series, it appears Nvidia has focused on the former rather than both. Harukaze5719 reports on X (formally Twitter) that Nvidia's upcoming Blackwell RTX 50-series GPUs will only see CUDA core count improvements over the Ada Lovelace RTX 40-series GPUs, with ROPs staying the same on the various tiers. The only exception is the entry-level GB207 die, which will get a whopping 33% reduction in ROPS count.
ROPs, or Render Output units (also Raster Operations Pipelines), play a vital role in the traditional GPU 3D rendering pipeline. As the name implies, these handle the processing of pixel and texel information, or in other words, rasterization workloads. ROPs generally aren't as important as shader cores, but they still play a key role in the GPU pipeline. You want to scale the number of ROPs relative to the number of shader cores and other processing clusters to provide optimal performance.
