It would appear that we’re much closer to the announcement of the revised NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 D(ragon) in the country China as several Chinese AIB vendors have quietly removed page listings for existing RTX 4090 offerings.
We’ve previously discussed how NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang was prepping to mitigate against US trade restrictions of artificial intelligence chips to various countries including China, such restrictions have now prohibited continued shipments of GeForce RTX 4090 graphics cards into the country which warrants a new revised model as existing units have skyrocketed in price.
Which brings us to the speculative RTX 4090 “D” which is most likely a further cutdown model retaining the same AD102 core or perhaps NVIDIA will graciously gift the Chinese the exact same specifications albeit with a firmware restriction reducing its overall TPP or Total processing Performance.
Especially given how NVIDIA are slated to announce various RTX 4000 series “SUPER” offerings, with the eagerly awaited RTX 4080 SUPER now slated to leverage the full AD103 core with a mere 5% bump in overall core count, it would not surprise me in the least of this supposed RTX 4090 Dragon were to come with inferior specifications compared to the actual RTX 4090 graphics card.
Essentially capitalizing upon the trade restrictions by giving Chinese consumers inferior waste silicon for the same $1600 MSRP that would be far better suited packaged as the aforementioned RTX 4080 SUPER.
Several board partners are presently delisting the original RTX 4090 cards from their CN websites. Gainward and Galaxy have already removed these cards, making them unsearchable manually. Additionally, these cards are no longer available in official stores.
To put it bluntly, nothing happened on October 12th 2022, the launch date of the GeForce RTX 4090, which according to various Chinese board vendors simply no longer exists much like a certain incident that never took place back in 1989.
GALAX, in particular, has encountered a highly complex situation. The company recently unveiled its 20th Anniversary Edition RTX 4090, a special variant of the RTX 4090 that commemorates GALAX China’s 20 years of operation.
Personally, I couldn’t believe that the GeForce RTX 4090 is already twenty years old, time sure move fast!
The formal announcement of this SKU occurred just three days before the official US ban on RTX 4090 came into effect. In response, the company has updated its marketing materials, omitting references to RTX 4090 and focusing solely on the 20th Edition. However, the official blog still retains all the previously announced information.
The scenario mirrors previous incidents where NVIDIA tried to press onwards with the hilariously cutdown GeForce RTX “4080 12 GB”, a SKU that NVIDIA eventually chose to redact entirely which has since been repurposed as the RTX 4070 Ti for $100 less than its initial MSRP.
Many board partners had unveiled designs and prominently showcased these cards on their websites for several weeks, only for them to suddenly disappear. Incidentally, NVIDIA’s Chinese website has removed the mention of the RTX 4090 outright, further insinuating that the graphics card no longer exists as far as Chinese gamers are concerned.
Consequently, companies like Gigabyte, MSI, or ASUS continue to display RTX 4090 cards as they were previously but the reasoning behind the delisting is pretty obvious, further shipments of RTX 4090 graphics cards will not be arriving in China via legitimate means, NVIDIA intends to plug the gap made by the US trade restrictions with a revised and most likely inferior rendition which will retain the same RTX 4090 name scheme, but will be dubbed the “D” insinuating that anyone who buys it is a guaranteed dumbass.
