Nerfed GeForce RTX 4090D for China to Launch Today

[btarunr]

NVIDIA this October was barred by the US Federal Trade Commission from selling the GeForce RTX 4090 in the Chinese domestic market. The company scampered to create a China-specific variant of the RTX 4090 that would comply with the FTC's limits on the AI inference performance, while mostly being as fast as the regular RTX 4090 at gaming. The resulting product is the RTX 4090D. This card has significantly lower AI inference performance, probably due to a lower Tensor core count as VideoCardz reports, or a firmware based performance limiter similar to LHR (lite hashrate) GPUs during the peak of the crypto-scalping GPU shortage. This card goes on sale today. To prevent modding of this GPU back to a regular RTX 4090, it probably comes with a different device ID, and other barriers that prevent video BIOS from regular RTX 4090 from being transplanted over; and overclocking of the GPU is disabled beyond the maximum boost frequency advertised. The TGP has been lowered to 425 W, too.



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[Crackong]

Let me guess
- Same Price
- Same Raster Performance
- Cut down Tensor to meet the AI requirement.
- 70% RT performance because of the cut down Tensor.

 

[Kn0xxPT]

I wonder how much would cost a GTX4090, you know... a gpu without the RT marketing stuff...

 

[Dristun]

Let me guess
- Same Price
- Same Raster Performance
- Cut down Tensor to meet the AI requirement.
- 70% RT performance because of the cut down Tensor.

Isn't RT running on its own cores? I thought Tensor only kicks in for DLSS in games.

 

[Crackong]

Isn't RT running on its own cores? I thought Tensor only kicks in for DLSS in games.

I think the Tensor cores are responsible for the de-noising part of the RT effects.

 

[N/A]

Well that is not how is advertised, enabling RT drops performance by 50%. and what do you do then, enable DLSS and bring the performance back up, see - magic. And now with the fake frames it's almost a necessity to fake the way until it makes it.

 

[P4-630]

Yai!

 

[ThomasK]

"A firmware based performance limiter similar to LHR (lite hashrate)" which was so poorly implemented, it took 'em like a week to circumvent?

Good luck with that.

 

[neatfeatguy]

"A firmware based performance limiter similar to LHR (lite hashrate)" which was so poorly implemented, it took 'em like a week to circumvent?

Good luck with that.

Actually, Nvidia released leaked accidently put out a driver on the release day of the first LHR cards that circumvented the LHR. It didn't stay out long and the "correct" non-circumventing LHR driver was put out.

 

[Zareek]

I seriously doubt Nvidia jumped through the hoops required to fully disable the tensor cores. Someone will unlock the full performance almost immediately. I give it a week or two before it ends up on the banned export list.

 

[Dristun]

GeForce RTX 4090 D Graphics Card | NVIDIA
Official specs have been posted by nvidia. CUDA core count also went down so maybe it's not just firmware?

 

[qcmadness]

Still not complied with the CCL.

 

[ZoneDymo]

hoping TPU or GN or so gets their hands on one for testing

 

[docnorth]

I would happily get a ‘crippled’ 4090 and keep it at stock settings

 

[Tomgang]

nerfed, crippled it has many names, but deep inside we all know that the real world is: Gimped

Well i guess a Gimped rtx 4090 is better than no 4090 at all for China.

But now i so wunder what will happen to the next gen of cards from nvidia to china vs. rest of the world. Will it be slow cards world wide or will china get slower cards in generel compared to other places then.
Time will tell, but i smells of china only RTX 5000 cards thats gimped to a laufhable matter.