Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090: Did Nvidia Use Defective Chips?

General news News Tech Tech News 02/22/2025

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TECH NEWS – It seems that the GPU used in the top Blackwell architecture card, the GB202, is not perfect in all cases…

The GeForce RTX 5000 graphics cards are not very available from stock (although we’ve written that Nvidia may change that in the near future), and there may be problems with the small stock. In fact, there are rumors that Nvidia’s currently most powerful graphics card may be faulty, which could lead to a significant drop in performance. And it’s not just one manufacturer (e.g. Zotac), but according to MegasizeGPU on Twitter it’s all of them, because it’s not one manufacturer’s fault, but Nvidia might have broken something in the GB202 chip.

If you check the card in GPU-Z, the graphics card analysis software, and it has less ROP than you’d expect (it’s supposed to be 176!), you’ve got a faulty model. The performance can be far below the expected level, and no, the fault is not in the software! A faulty RTX 5090 was checked by Hwinfo and they also found less ROP (render output unit). At the moment we only know that some cards are affected, but not only an AIB model has problems (so not only one manufacturer is affected), but even the Founders Edition card from Nvidia itself could run into this bug!

The root cause is the chip. A small batch of GB202 is defective, and the bios can not do anything with this issue.

— MEGAsizeGPU (@Zed__Wang) February 21, 2025

Nvidia will certainly have to replace all cards (and will do so through the manufacturers). Since this is probably not the strongest Blackwell chip (since it usually ends in 0; the higher the higher the weaker), it could be a very unpleasant situation for the “greens”. Maybe that’s why they have delayed the production of the mid-range cards (RTX 5060, RTX 5070), because the performance is not perfect there either. Maybe there is something wrong here and Nvidia has made a serious mistake in the production of GPUs…

The situation is still evolving, but this does not bode well for Nvidia. After DeepSeek, this could be another reason for the stock to crash!

Source: WCCFTech

Angyal Anikó

Anikó, our news editor and communication manager, is more interested in the business side of the gaming industry. She worked at banks, and she has a vast knowledge of business life. Still, she likes puzzle and story-oriented games, like Sherlock Holmes: Crimes & Punishments, which is her favourite title. She also played The Sims 3, but after accidentally killing a whole sim family, swore not to play it again. (For our office address, email and phone number check out our IMPRESSUM)