Nvidia has categorically denied that its upcoming RTX 50 family of laptop GPUs has been hit by the same missing ROP debacle as numerous variants of RTX 50 desktop graphics cards.
Reports emerged this week from German tech site Heise Online that Nvidia had instructed laptop makers to double-check the ROP or render output count on RTX 50 laptops that had already been produced. For the record, GPUs with fewer ROPs than the official specifications have been shown to suffer measurably lower performance, with Nvidia itself defining that loss as 4% in graphical workloads, but some third-party testing claims a loss of 10% or more.
Speaking of these laptop manufacturers, Heise Online says (via Google translate), “they are currently working extra shifts in the Far East to prevent the drama from moving into the next act. Nvidia has asked manufacturers to check notebooks that have already been produced with the new mobile GeForce RTX 5000 graphics chips. Here, too, the focus is on GPUs that have fewer ROPs active than the data sheet specifies. This leads to potentially significant losses in 3D performance.”
Heise Online claims that the launch of RTX 50 laptops slated for the end of March could be delayed as a consequence. Superficially, this stands to reason because laptop GPUs use precisely the same GPU dies as desktop GPUs, albeit typically rebranded to a tier above a given desktop counterpart.
So, the RTX 5070 mobile will use the same GB206 GPU die as the 5060 desktop, or the 5070 Ti mobile will use the GB205 die as seen in the RTX 5070 desktop instead of the GB203 die used by the RTX 5070 Ti desktop.
The precise alignment of desktop to mobile varies, and sometimes they overlap. In any case, mobile GPUs are not bespoke GPU dies, just specific variations of those dies, sometimes with different CUDA core counts. Anyway, if desktop GPUs using those same dies have accidentally escaped with a single partition of eight ROPs disabled, maybe it’s happened with laptop GPUs.
Not so, according to Nvidia. When asked by the Verge about the missing ROP problem hitting laptops, Nvidia GeForce global PR director Ben Berraondo simply said, “nope.” The Verge further asked Berraondo to clarify if this meant, “No laptop GPUs are affected,” and he replied, “Correct, no further issues.”
That’s a clear and unambiguous denial. The slight problem is that Nvidia originally claimed that the missing ROP debacle was restricted to RTX 5090, RTX 5090D, and RTX 5070 Ti GPUs, only to later concede that some RTX 5080s were also impacted.
Nvidia only made that later concession after reports of afflicted 5080s emerged on Reddit. Nvidia has also said that it did not ship any GPUs in the knowledge that they were missing ROPs.
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If that’s reassuring on one level, it also begs the question of how it can be certain that no laptop GPUs are impacted. For now, you’d have to say the jury is out, and it’s hard to be totally confident in Nvidia’s pronouncements on the matter. Whether they’ve proven inaccurate by accident or design, Nvidia has not only got the hardware wrong but has fumbled the response, too.
Exactly how this all happened is quite the mystery. For now, it’s not totally clear if it’s plausible that GPUs with a partition of ROPs disabled can really happen by accident. For instance, if BIOS support for the ROP count is required for the GPU to be functional, then there had to be awareness at some level that GPUs with incorrect ROP counts were going out.
All of which means we’ll be watching this one closely. And if you do buy an RTX 50 laptop—or an RTX 50 desktop GPU, for that matter—it’s probably a good idea to make checking the ROP count using a tool like CPU-Z among the very first things you do!
