NVIDIA's China-Exclusive RTX 4090D GPU Holds Its Own Against Standard 4090 Despite Constraints

NVIDIA's recent release of the China-exclusive GeForce RTX 4090D GPU has been met with a comprehensive review. Despite being a cut-down version with Total Processing Performance (TPP) constraints, it exhibits performance on par with the standard RTX 4090.

The GALAX GeForce RTX 4090D Metal Master, featuring the AD102-250 GPU, adheres to US policies, avoiding TPP restrictions that led to the creation of the RTX 4090D for the Chinese market. The GPU boasts 14,592 cores, 456 tensor cores, 114 RT cores, and 24 GB of GDDR6X memory. Notably, it shares a similar gaming performance with the RTX 4090, despite an 11% reduction in CUDA cores and tensor cores, a slightly lower TGP of 425W, and no support for a Founders Edition model.

In gaming tests at 4K resolution, the RTX 4090D proved to be around 5.8% slower than the RTX 4090, narrowing to 5% with frame generation enabled. The card's retail price in China matches the standard RTX 4090 MSRP at 12,999 RMB. Overclocking within the 425W TGP limit resulted in a 2.3% performance increase in synthetic workloads, indicating a potential 1-2% gain in games.

Despite the reduced number of cores, the RTX 4090D performs commendably, outpacing the AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX in rasterized performance. The GPU's power efficiency is evident, with temperatures staying below 70°C for GPU temperature and 76°C for hotspot temperature. With the RTX 4090D, NVIDIA maintains its flagship gaming graphics card position in China, offering robust AI performance.