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.
Zotac and PNY don’t make the chips, NVIDIA at fault here. Some people care because they don’t actually have a ton of money, but gaming is their hobby and they’ve saved up 2-3 years so they can afford a high end card because it’s worth it to them the extra $50 or $100 represents the difference between being able to afford the card and not, or maybe having a couple of extra games to play on it.
But Nvidia have clearly sold them the chips and told than that some of those cores aren’t working. And they said OK and hoped nobody would really notice.
What NVIDIA have told AIBs is completely unknown, but NVIDIA certainly hold all the power, if NVIDIA say ship them, they ship them.
Note there have been reports of FE cards, MSI, Zotac, Gigabyte and Manli all impacted.