Why you should care about the RTX 50 Series ROPs fiasco - even if you don’t own one

The first few months of 2025 have been eventful in the GPU space to say the least, and besides the warm reception of Radeon 9000 GPUs, there's been a ton of negative press flying around, with most of it directed squarely at Nvidia. Pitiful amounts of stock at launch, reports of burning 12VHP power connectors, and perhaps most surprisingly, heaps of driver issues plagued the new RTX 50 series cards. But that's just the tip of the iceberg. As if it couldn't get any worse, reports of missing ROPs, known as Raster Operations Pipeline or Render Output Units, were found on 5090, 5090D, 5080, and 5070 Ti GPUs.