Seems like so far, as far as anybody knows, only the Zotac “Solid” cards are affected.
First paragraph reads:
TechPowerUp has discovered that there are NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 graphics cards in retail circulation that come with too few render units, which lowers performance. Zotac’s GeForce RTX 5090 Solid comes with fewer ROPs than it should—168 are enabled, instead of the 176 that are part of the RTX 5090 specifications. This loss of 8 ROPs has a small, but noticeable impact on performance. During recent testing, we noticed our Zotac RTX 5090 Solid sample underperformed slightly, falling behind even the NVIDIA RTX 5090 Founders Edition card. At the time we didn’t pay attention to the ROP count that TechPowerUp GPU-Z was reporting, and instead spent time looking for other reasons, like clocks, power, cooling, etc.
Flashback to the 970 debacle
Can you remember a fuckup-free Nvidia launch?
Un-releases, melting connecters (part 1), cropped vram.
Geforces 1-3 We’re ok on launch from what I remember…
10 series there was backlash over them advertising an MSRP and getting reviewers to assess the cards at that value, but having “founders pricing”, where the initial run of cards (that IIRC were Nvidia reference cards only) were far more than the MSRP.
20 series they ramped up prices despite small performance gains, saying that it’s due to ray tracing, and that when new ray tracing games came out the difference would be incredible. Ray traced games didn’t actually come out until long after, and the RT performance was straight up unplayable on any card. But enough time had went past that people couldn’t return the cards by the time that was known.
30 series there was the supply issues, 3090s and 3080s melting in a few games (most prominently in New Dawn), outrageously fake MSRPs (Nvidia was actually selling the GPUs to partners for more than the MSRP!), and really bad levels of VRAM that caused issues (8GB on the 3070/3070 Ti)