January had Nvidia unveiling the most awaited RTX 50 series, with GeForce RTX 5090 in the frontline for a starting price of $1,999 for a select lucky few. This model pretty much stands in the crème de la crème of consumer graphics from this company, but it seems not all variants are equal here.
A latest report surfaced, further adding to the regime of landslides determining the chances of survival for Nvidia’s latest hardware release. According to a report from TechPowerUp, the ‘Zotac GeForce RTX 5090 Solid’ has fewer Raster Operations Pipelines (ROPs) than other good brands’ offerings.
While the normal setup for a 5090 would be around 176 ROPs, the Zotac cards in question have only 168, according to monitoring tools such as GPU-Z. Screenshots from TechPowerUp illustrate that the ROP counts of the affected Zotac cards are indeed less than those of the unaffected counterparts.
This difference in Pixel Fillrates accounted in these images leads to the performance drop registered for the lower ROP models. According to the results of testing conducted by the publication, this ROP reduction measurably hinders performance by 4.54 percent for the Zotac card in raster rendering when comparing it to other brands and the Nvidia Founders Edition.
This was especially prominent in the benchmarks for Elden Ring at 4K resolution with maximum settings, excluding DLSS. ROPs, short for Raster Operations Pipelines, are vital parts of a GPU that manage the last stages of the rendering process, converting 3D data to a 2D image displayed.
These handle pixel data and antialiasing; hence any minus, like the missing eight ROPs in the Zotac 5090, could translate into a visible repro on performance. The impact across different games could also be uneven, with less visible drops in performance for titles like Doom Eternal and Starfield. RTX 5090 card owners can confirm their ROP count by running GPU-Z and checking the available ROPs section, which should register on 176 according to Nvidia.
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