We finally have some reputable data about the expected performance penalty for Nvidia's defective RTX 50 series GPUs, thanks to Gamers Nexus. The YouTube channel's Steve Burke put up a bounty for Blackwell cards with missing ROPs. Burke offered a $500 bonus on top of the price on the receipt while covering both shipping and taxes. He successfully managed to procure a defective RTX 5080 Founders Edition in exchange for a Zotac equivalent with all its ROPs operational.
In its original statement, Nvidia confirmed that only 0.5% of produced RTX 5090s and RTX 5070 Tis had been affected by the missing ROPs issue. This assertion would be short-lived, as just two days later, we found an RTX 5080 with a similar defect; it had 104 ROPs instead of the advertised 112. In synthetics, based on user-testing, the nerfed RTX 5080 scored 12% lower than what you'd normally expect. TechPowerUp's results were the only estimate of the performance delta in gaming benchmarks before these Gamers Nexus tests. The RTX 5070 should not be subject to similar problems. Even if defective chips were produced, let's hope AIBs and Nvidia can manage to keep them out of consumer hands.
Nvidia reported an on-average 4% difference in graphical performance if a GPU had missing ROPs. In the handful of games Burke tested, simple bad luck could land you up-to 11% behind other RTX 5080 users, as shown in Total War: Warhammer 3 at 4K. Moving over to the 1440p results, the gap closes somewhat as most games are within 3-4%, with a maximum variation of 8.8% in Dying Light 2 Stay Human. The data indicates that higher resolutions are generally more taxing on the ROP units.
When compared against other GPUs in the same ballpark, in the worst-case scenario, the defective RTX 5080 falls to RTX 5070 Ti levels, which invalidates the $250 price gap between the two. Of course, these results are game-dependent, so these outcomes aren't universal.
The best resolution from Nvidia is to create a driver-level identifier to alarm users if their RTX 50 GPU is missing ROP units. This is because the average consumer likely doesn't use third-party hardware monitoring utilities like GPU-Z and HWiNFO. Even if partners are offering replacements and refunds, supply constraints could keep you waiting for days, if not weeks for a new graphics card.
On the bright side, faulty RTX 5080s, before PCB assembly, could be repurposed by Nvidia (through software) as RTX 5070 Tis, in the future. A BIOS reflash could potentially restore these special units to RTX 5080 specs, unless Nvidia scraps these dies.
