To comply with U.S. export controls, NVIDIA prepares the GeForce RTX 4090 D for release in China.

NVIDIA is preparing to release the GeForce RTX 4090 D, a graphics card specifically tailored for the Chinese gaming market. This SKU addresses the needs of gamers in the enthusiast segment, as the regular RTX 4090 has been purchased by Chinese companies for AI acceleration purposes. Due to existing restrictions, NVIDIA is unable to sell the card in its current form within China.

What distinguishes this SKU is its compliance with U.S. export controls on GPUs that can also function as high compute-density AI accelerators. In simpler terms, its AI performance will be intentionally limited. This will be achieved by reducing the card's TPP (total processing performance), potentially resulting in slower performance compared to the regular RTX 4090. This approach is somewhat reminiscent of NVIDIA's creation of LHR (lite hash rate) GPUs for gamers, which was a response to the overwhelming demand from cryptocurrency miners rather than a government policy. The expected retail price for the RTX 4090 D is RMB 13,000, similar to the baseline price of the RTX 4090.