NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 5090 “GB202” Chip Defect Discovered in Certain Market Units; Potentially Affects All Variants

NVIDIA’s latest GeForce RTX 5090 GPUs are facing another wave of trouble, as reports indicate issues with the "Blackwell" GB202 chip in some units.

NVIDIA’s Top-Tier RTX Blackwell GPU Faces Performance Issues Linked to GB202 Chip

It seems gamers just can’t catch a break with the current GPU market. Initially, it was hard enough to get your hands on NVIDIA’s top-tier RTX Blackwell model due to limited stock. Now, it appears some of these GPUs are defective, leading to significant drops in performance. Just recently, we highlighted a case with the ZOTAC GeForce RTX 5090 facing these issues and now, it looks like the problem is rooted in the Blackwell GB202 chip itself, a revelation shared by @MEGAsizeGPU.

In a tweet from February 21, 2025, @MEGAsizeGPU points out that a batch of GB202 chips is defective, and unfortunately, no software update via BIOS could address this fault.

For those who might not be up to speed, the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090 has been appearing online with missing ROPs in GPU-Z tests—indicating that affected users are dealing with weaker-than-expected GPU performance. At first, some thought the error was with GPU-Z itself. But now, all eyes are on the GB202 chip, which isn’t promising news.

To confirm that this is not just a GPU-Z anomaly, tests on an affected RTX 5090 using HWINFO also detected the ROP shortage, hinting at a substantial underlying issue. Although the problem seems to be affecting only a limited number of units so far, it’s not restricted to a single assembler’s model. Rumor has it that even the FE models could be caught up in this.

In light of these developments, we’ve reached out to NVIDIA for more information. Given that the GB202 chip is the root of the problem, it’s possible NVIDIA will initiate replacements under their RMA policy. Let’s hope this issue doesn’t escalate—especially since NVIDIA is already dealing with delays on their mid-range GPUs due to separate performance concerns.

If you own one of these cards, we recommend checking the ROP count on your model. If it’s below 176, let us know. At this stage, we’re still trying to determine if the GeForce RTX 5080 or other models are similarly affected. Keep an eye on this developing situation.