NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 D GPU Launched In China: Reduced Cores, Similar  Gaming Performance For $1599 US

NVIDIA’s GeForce RTX 4090 D is a product artificially cut to comply with the sanctions imposed by the US for companies to export products to China, a measure that in the field of computing is difficult to understand and even more so when we see the results that we will explain, but that is what there is currently. According to what they tell us in Expreview, they have taken the gauntlet to a GALAX GeForce RTX 4090D Metal Master that uses the AD102-250 chip and not the most common variant for the RTX 4090, which is the AD102-300, all in order not to exceed 4,800 TPP (Total Processing Performance). All this makes the card a little slower compared to the RTX 4090, the basic specifications are the following: 14,592 vs 16,384 CUDA cores, 456 vs 512 Tensor cores, 114 vs 128 RT cores, and a 425W TGP instead of the 450W. It seems that the core clock frequencies and the entire memory section remain the same.

NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 D GPU Launched In China: Reduced Cores, Similar  Gaming Performance For 99 US

According to Expreview, this card can still be overclocked somewhat while maintaining this 425W limit, thereby achieving up to 200 MHz extra, which provides 2.3% better performance in synthetic tests and which in practice would be an improvement of 1 -2% on games. They have carried out several performance tests that separate them according to the type of scenario compared to a normal GeForce RTX 4090:

  • Synthetic tests: 6.7% slower
  • Games (rasterization): 5.5% slower
  • Gaming (ray tracing): 5.8% slower
  • Gaming (DLSS3 frame rate): 5% slower
  • Productivity, AI, and content creation: 6% slower

However, they say that the recommended price or MSRP is 12,999 RMB in China (Yuan) and that it coincides with the recommended MSRP of the RTX 4090 in that country, so for the same money you now get a slower card and that doesn’t matter. It is fair since it would involve a price adjustment by the company which, we assume, wants to recover the investment it has made in creating a specific model for said market.

All in all, seeing the significant cuts in the graphics core with this AD102-250 variant, it can be said that the performance difference is smaller than what could be expected and this approximate loss of 5-6% is difficult to appreciate outside of the benchmarks and therefore demonstrates that neither the sanctions change the product much nor that anyone would dislike this graphics card that, at a slightly lower price, could sell well in any market.

It also shows that the design of the RTX 4090 is not used to the maximum in most applications and that simply increasing the number of computing units sometimes achieves increasing consumption, size, and price without offering a palpable improvement in its performance.

United States put chip restrictions on China and Nvidia

The trade war between China and the United States has intensified in the last year, with blockades on both sides. At the beginning of last October, we learned that the US will try to place a series of measures to truncate the global semiconductor market in China; on the other hand, the Asian giant reduced its imports of gallium to a minimum, a fundamental element for the creation of technology. This whole matter has escalated to companies involved in the international market, such as NVIDIA, which as reported by The Verge, has found a way to bypass the restrictions to sell its products in China. In particular, they modified the RTX 4090 to be able to sell it in the Chinese market.

A slower, but legal, RTX 4090 model

On an NVIDIA product page for China, you can see the RTX 4090D offer, a graphics card similar to the original 4090, but with certain modifications that have earned it a reduction in its potential. It is less powerful than all the other models of this RTX sold anywhere else.

Benjamin Berroando, NVIDIA spokesperson, confirmed in contact with The Verge that it was a ” five percent slower model in terms of gaming and development .” In addition, he mentions that it was exclusively designed to meet all the export requirements that the United States imposes for sales in China.

The RTX 4090D has 14,592 CUDA cores while the traditional version has 16,384 elements, this means that the 4090D has 11% fewer cores than the original. So the reduction makes this model the least powerful and slowest of its family of NVIDIA cards.

That the world was going through a semiconductor crisis is not new news, but this got worse for China after the blockade implemented by the United States. The sanctions left several industries in the Asian country against a rock and a hard place, many of them having to dismantle RTX 4090 to reuse them as accelerators for artificial intelligence. So the entry of a product without restrictions for your country can help mitigate the shortage.

By win11

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