Nvidia introduced the GeForce RTX 5090D video card, which is slower than the RTX 5090 only in AI

Nvidia, in addition to the four GeForce RTX 50 series desktop video cards, introduced a special version of its flagship for China – the GeForce RTX 5090D video card. The new product, surprisingly, is no different from the regular GeForce RTX 5090 in terms of technical characteristics and gaming performance, but the speed in AI tasks of the GeForce RTX 5090D is artificially low. This is done so that Nvidia can supply such an accelerator to China.

Image source: NVIDIA

The GeForce RTX 5090D is based on the Nvidia GB202 graphics processor of the Blackwell family with 21,760 CUDA cores and a clock speed of up to 2.41 GHz in Turbo mode – the same parameters as the GeForce RTX 5090. However, the flagship for China differs in terms of tensor cores that meet for the work of artificial intelligence algorithms. The performance of this unit is reduced from 3352 TOPS (trillion operations per second) to 2375 TOPS, that is, the RTX 5090D offers approximately 70% of the AI ​​performance of the regular RTX 5090. The amount of video memory on both video cards is identical – 32 GB GDDR7 with a bandwidth of 1792 GB / s .

Thus, gaming performance, including ray tracing, remained the same for both flagships, which distinguishes them favorably from the previous generation accelerators – GeForce RTX 4090D and GeForce RTX 4090. The GeForce RTX 4090D GPU had fewer CUDA cores and other computing units and was limited in frequency and power consumption, which reduced gaming performance. Although the gap between them was insignificant.

The Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090D will be sold in China for 16,499 yuan, which is approximately $2,250. This compares to the GeForce RTX 5090’s MSRP of $1,999 in the US, including Chinese taxes.

Let us add that rumors about the appearance of the GeForce RTX 5080D, a version of the RTX 5080 adapted for China, were not confirmed. The GeForce RTX 5080 graphics card provides AI performance of 1801 TOPS, which allows it to be sold in China without any restrictions.