Chinese consumers are getting dicked by the dragon.
NVIDIA has formally introduced the RTX 4090D, as a makeshift seamless replacement addressing the challenges posed by import restrictions on the RTX 4090 card in China, a significant market for NVIDIA following the monumental rise of lucrative Artificial Intelligence.
To meet restrictions, the company decided to modify the existing RTX 4090 SKU to align with U.S. government regulations regarding GPU exports to China.
As previously established, Chinese AIB board partners have erased the existence of NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 graphics card in the country in anticipation of this new model, which also mentioned prior would likely receive a reduction in overall CUDA core counts to adhere to the United States policies.
This unfortunately has turned out to be true, as NVIDIA will now gladly milk Chinese consumers for effectively the same price tag as the previous GeForce RTX 4090 model, that being $1600 USD / ¥13,000 RMB however it will provide inferior gaming performance.
This is just natural corporate policy for NVIDIA, no company on this planet can be considered a charity but NVIDIA with their immense mindshare in the eyes of the public seemingly loves to gouge and fuck over consumers as witnessed with the outlandish pricing for their latest RTX 4000 series graphics cards that journalists seemingly justify.
The China-exclusive RTX 4090D variant features a reduction in core count, dropping from the standard 16,384 CUDA cores to a diminished 14,592. This marks an almost 11% decrease in core count, while the pricing remains essentially unchanged versus the now banned model.
On top of having a lower TGP value of 425W from 450W, this new card shouldn’t feature the ability of overclocking either, its Tensor cores had been dropped from 512 down to 456, allowing the card to comply with recent regulations of 4800 TOPS.
The card upholds its specifications with 24GB of GDDR6X memory, running at a clock speed of 21 Gbps and utilizing an 384-bit memory interface, that’s all generally unchanged however the reduction in the actual core counts certainly will provide inferior gaming performance and certainly AI potential.
If we were being honest about the nature of the RTX 4090D, in a perfect world where NVIDIA isn’t proactively fucking over consumers, this SKU would effectively be the illusive “RTX 4080 Ti” that we’ve been waiting so much for, albeit with 24GB of VRAM as opposed to 20GB or thereabouts.
The RTX 4090 Dragon appears to be a compromised product born out of regulatory compliance rather than consumer convenience. Notably, it maintains the exact same memory specifications as the standard RTX 4090, suggesting that AI performance shouldn’t see a significant drop as one might expect despite the reduction in CUDA core and Tensor core figures.
But the way I see it is quite clear, this is an outright inferior product sold to Chinese consumers for the exact same price as the now prohibited RTX 4090, NVIDIA is a very generous company.
