In a shocking twist of fate that apparently the tech press didn’t see coming, NVIDIA are continuing onwards with their plan of invading the Chinese market with inferior quality hardware with a similar naming scheme for the exact same $RRP as the GeForce RTX 4090 in the region.
We’ve gone over this enough already, NVIDIA was rumored to be producing what’s believed to be called the RTX 4090 “D”, which apparently stands for Dragon as a reference for Chinese New Year, specifically to be sold in the region which has recently become the scrutiny of the United States and their bid to restrict access to invaluable silicon products amidst the dawn of the AI era.
Previously, the United States imposed sanctions against the exportation of high-performance AI oriented GPU hardware, with a maximum limit in place of 4800 TOPs, with several of NVIDIA’s graphics cards exceeding the limit, the big green giant could no longer export such hardware into China among various other regions any longer.
As NVIDIA CEO, Jensen Huang always says; “the greater the ban, the bigger the scam”.
Or something along those lines, because NVIDIA swiftly repurposed various GPUs, such as the H100 and into the H800 to circumvent these new restrictions, unfortunately their flagship “consumer” graphics card, the GeForce RTX 4090 was also one of the many victims of this trade ban.
NVIDIA is extremely desperate to fulfill immensely profitable orders in the region of China, which is why the company intends to introduce the HGX H20, L20 and L2 AI oriented solutions also aimed to illude the United States government and undermine their national security, the very same as the GeForce RTX 4090 D.
NVIDIA got a very loud and clear warning from the US Commerce Secretary, Gina Raimondo who proclaimed that any GPU that was redesigned from a previously banned product for the purpose of Artificial Intelligence, that she would take control over it the very next day.
Several Chinese AIB board partners have already removed the existence of the GeForce RTX 4090 by purging their own product listings, and it would seem that NVIDIA wish to press onward despite the inevitability of the United States government banning this new graphics card offering anyway.
Speculations circulating on Benchlife indicate that shipments of GA102-250 GPUs to China are expected to begin this week. This development could potentially lead to the full disclosure of the card’s specifications. Notably, the site has now officially confirmed that these cards are indeed in transit.
For NVIDIA to meet the recently imposed requirements of the trade restriction against the region of China, they would otherwise have to somewhat cripple its specifications to meet the performance threshold.
Some outlets speculated that NVIDIA would graciously repackage the bog-standard RTX 4090 and artificially limit its compute ability, which is something they’ve done previously however it wouldn’t be as profitable.
Benchlife reports that the GeForce RTX 4090 D will lack the ability for overclocking on a firmware level, meaning consumers simply will not be able to adjust or modify GPU core and memory frequencies.
Furthermore, the website verifies a decrease in Thermal Design Power (TDP) from 450W to 425W. It remains uncertain whether Total Graphics Power (TGP) will reach the original 450W, or if the revised 425W is an absolute limit that cannot be exceeded in any manner.
Considering that the elusive GeForce RTX 4090 D needs to stay below a 4800 TOPs threshold, it seems to aim for this goal by adopting a higher base clock speed while maintaining identical boost frequencies to the standard RTX 4090.
The most reasonable assumption would be that NVIDIA plans to reduce the overall number of CUDA cores, a plausible scenario given the company’s business practices.
So once again, NVIDIA are taking advantage of the recent hardware restrictions against the Chinese region, which saw preexisting GeForce RTX 4090 prices to skyrocket as there aren’t any new shipments of the aforementioned model being sent to China moving forward.
NVIDIA plans to launch the RTX 4090 D, featuring a reduced core count, a lower TDP and firmware-locked frequencies. This GPU is designed to deliver inferior gaming performance but sufficient compute power to bypass the new restrictions imposed by the United States.
Despite being labeled as the RTX 4090, spec-wise it’s more like the long-awaited RTX 4080 Ti we deserve. NVIDIA aims to market this product at the same MSRP as the previous GeForce RTX 4090 which mind you has been erased from the history books as far as Chinese AIBs are concerned.
Honestly at this point I want NVIDIA to announce this pile of shit, I hope the United States government takes a more assertive approach in dealing with NVIDIA who are seemingly so desperate to make a quick buck from Chinese sales, though chances are extremely high that the RTX 4090 D will probably escape scrutiny, the same probably will not be said for the HGX H20, L20 and L2 as those will likely be banned (again).
