NVIDIA’s RTX 4090 D No Longer Safe as US Cracks Down on Tech
At the close of last year, to comply with the United States government’s newly instituted export controls on cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI) chips, NVIDIA introduced a compliant version of the RTX 4090 D graphics card for the Chinese mainland market, intended to supplant its flagship product, the GeForce RTX 4090, which had been included in the restricted list.
Recently, however, it has been reported that the U.S. government revised its control regulations, imposing restrictions on devices capable of “adjustable peak performance” exceeding 70 TFLOPS, thereby intensifying the scope of regulation. This includes the RTX 4090 D (73.5 TFLOPS) and the NVIDIA H20 (74 TFLOPS), with the newly affected regions extending to Macau, China, and the D:5 group territories. Moreover, advanced technological products such as photolithography machines and AI chips have also been incorporated into the latest control measures, with the revised regulations set to come into effect on April 4th.
Initially, NVIDIA only needed to perform a reduction on the specifications of the RTX 4090 to meet the comprehensive computational performance (TPP) limit of 4800 to qualify for market release, considering that both the FP8 and FP16 TPP of the RTX 4090 are 5286, exceeding the limit by about 10%. The introduction of the RTX 4090 D ensures the continuity of the RTX 40 series product line in the Chinese mainland market, making every effort to eliminate the impact of other factors and prevent potential gaps in the product line, thereby fully satisfying the demands of high-end gamers for high-performance gaming graphics cards. With the advent of the new regulations, gamers may have to shift their focus to the RTX 4080 SUPER or AMD’s RX 7900 XTX.
The RTX 4090 D is equipped with an AD102-250 GPU, reducing the number of CUDA cores from 16384 in the RTX 4090 to 14592, Tensor cores from 512 to 456, and RT cores from 128 to 114. However, the base frequency of the RTX 4090 D is slightly higher than that of the RTX 4090, at 2280 MHz compared to 2235 MHz, while the boost frequency remains the same, at 2520 MHz.
