In brief: In what could have been the latest piece of disastrous news for Nvidia’s RTX 5000 series, there have been reports that the missing ROPs issue affecting some desktop cards was also present in laptop GPUs. However, Nvidia has categorically denied this is the case, though the company’s typically ambiguous answers suggest this issue may have been present but was caught and addressed during testing.
According to German publication Heise Online (via HardwareLuxx), Nvidia has asked notebook manufacturers to ensure their manufacturing partners in the Far East work extra shifts to spot any laptops with missing ROP units before they are shipped to retailers.
After some users discovered that their desktop RTX 5000-series cards had fewer ROP units than they were supposed to, Nvidia said that an issue had affected less than half a percent of RTX 5090, 5090D, and 5070 Ti GPUs, which shipped with at least one ROP missing. The company later admitted that the RTX 5080 was also affected – though only after a user found the problem in their model. Nvidia added that this could affect gaming performance by four percent, but AI and compute performance were unaffected.
As with the desktop GPUs, the reports claim only a tiny number of laptop GPUs were missing the ROP units. One manufacturer that Heise Online spoke to allegedly said its first batch of laptop devices had to be fixed, though it never said if the problem was also present in other batches.
Nvidia told The Verge that its RTX 5000 laptops aren’t missing ROP units. “All partners continue to run checks as part of our standard testing procedure,” said Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo, who added that the company will be contacting both German publications to discuss the reports.
The Verge triple-checked with Berraondo that “no laptop GPUs are affected by the missing ROP issue,” to which he replied, “Correct, no further issues.”
Berraondo could be referring to the desktop cards’ missing ROPs when he says there are no “further” issues, or he could mean that while the problem exists in laptop GPUs, manufacturers are conducting more thorough checks to ensure all ROP units are present before shipping.
There have been reports that the top-end RTX 5000-series laptops were delayed from January to March while the mid-range and low-end variants have been pushed back from March to April or May. Heise writes that one possible reason for the delay could be that Nvidia only recently distributed the final vBIOS for the notebook GPUs.
