If you've been out of the loop, a handful of RTX 50-series (Blackwell)GPUs are reported to suffer from a manufacturing flaw that fuses off an ROP partition in the GPU. Nvidia quickly addressed these reports and claimed that only the RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and RTX 5070 Ti are affected; however, a new Reddit user report indicates that the RTX 5080 is also implicated. Courtesy of Hardwareluxx, the user tested their unit in 3DMark Time Spy, where it suffered a 12% performance loss, enough to put it behind the RTX 4080 Super in some scenarios.
As the news spread, Nvidia followed up with a statement asserting that only 0.5% of units manufactured are affected, with an on-average 4% loss in graphical performance. The defect is consistent across all impacted GPUs, disabling only one ROP partition (eight ROPs). Such manufacturing flaws typically occur when manufacturers fuse off individual components from a full-fat die for binning. For example, GB202 carries 192 SMs; however, the RTX 5090 uses a partially enabled variant with 170 enabled SMs.
