Missing ROPs Issue Found in NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 Series Laptops

Shortly after our initial report on the absence of ROPs in the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 series "Blackwell" desktop GPUs, it has come to light that the laptop versions of these GPUs may also suffer from the same problem. The missing ROP (Raster Operations Pipeline) units can result in a performance degradation of up to 14%. According to the German publication Heise Online, NVIDIA is collaborating with laptop manufacturers to investigate any instances of missing ROPs in its GeForce RTX 50 series cards, which the company claims affects only 0.5% of the total supply. To ensure that consumers do not receive GPUs with missing ROPs, NVIDIA is working closely with OEMs to verify that the GPUs are functioning correctly and delivering the hardware as per the specification sheet.

With the NVIDIA Blackwell laptop SKUs announced at CES and pre-orders starting in February, NVIDIA had originally planned to distribute these GPUs to consumers through its partner laptop manufacturers in March. However, the release is now scheduled for April, a month later than anticipated. Heise Online reported that notebook manufacturers are currently working diligently in the Far East to address the issue before it escalates further. NVIDIA has instructed manufacturers to inspect notebooks already produced with the new mobile GeForce RTX 5000 graphics chips, focusing on GPUs with fewer active ROPs than specified in the datasheet, as this could result in significant 3D performance losses.