Nvidia may be working on a D variant of its RTX 5090 targeting China. Like its predecessor, this model would be solely made to avoid US restrictions, while delivering as much performance as possible.
According to Hongxing2020 on X, Nvidia is seemingly planning to launch an RTX 5090D for the Chinese market. This means that Team Green will attempt the same procedure as with the RTX 4090D to avoid US export restrictions.
The leaker also expects this card will launch in January 2025, leading us to suspect that other RTX 50 series GPUs may come around the same time or earlier. Moreover, this supports previous leaks claiming that some RTX 50 series GPUs are on track for late 2024 or early 2025.
Though the leaker didn’t venture into performance predictions, we know that this hypothetical RTX 5090D can’t exceed 70 Weighted TeraFLOPS (WT) as stated by US export restrictions. Bureau of Industry and Security to accurately predict the suitability of a system for complex computational problems.
That said, logically this card should deliver performance sitting between the RTX 5080 and RTX 5090. Nvidia may achieve this by cutting down the GB202 GPU, lowering the TDP, locking down frequency, or reducing the VRAM bandwidth. Talking of which, the memory system should carry the same capacity as the regular RTX 5090, i.e. 28GB of 28Gbps GDDR7, according to the latest rumours.
To avoid restrictions, Nvidia had to slice the AD102 GPU of the RTX 4090 by nearly 11%, reducing the CUDA core count from 16,384 to 14,592. However, since the RTX 5090 will benefit from the IPC gains brought by the Blackwell architecture, the difference between it and the fuller RTX 5090 may be larger. But as usual, until official announcements, take all the above with a grain of salt.
